If you’ve ever been in charge of your company’s cloud cost, you likely understand how painful it can be to accurately allocate shared cloud spend.
In fact, in the 2021 State of FinOps report, “dealing with shared costs” was the second most common challenge faced by FinOps.
Today, I’m excited to share that we’ve taken a huge step toward alleviating that pain. We’ve made improvements to CloudZero Dimensions (our unique code-driven approach to allocating cloud cost) that will help companies realize all the benefits of using shared infrastructure without the complexity of having to account for it by hand.
At CloudZero, we pride ourselves on being able to organize spend better than anyone else out there. We understand that you can’t make progress on your cloud cost initiatives until you understand how your spend maps to your business.
These improvements will give our customers even more precision and flexibility — along with the confidence that their cloud cost intelligence will be continuously accurate and up to date.
The Difference: Telemetry-Driven Shared Cost Allocation
Now, you might be wondering, “Don’t other cost tools do this?” The answer is yes and no.
Many cost solutions enable their customers to manually apportion their spend. For example, you can choose to allocate 50% of cost to one product and 50% to another. The problem is that at the end of the day, many companies are ultimately just guessing.
In fact, when I speak with finance and FinOps professionals, more often than not, they tell me that they end up doing some rough math in spreadsheets each month and crossing their fingers that it’s close enough.
Now, if this approach works well for you, you can continue to allocate spend proportionally in CloudZero. We have that functionality too.
However, these new improvements take it a step further. For more advanced companies who want truly accurate cloud cost allocation, they can now apply telemetry to represent utilization — dynamically allocating spend and producing truly accurate results.
How It Works
You start by choosing a metric to represent usage and consumption. If you’re not sure what to pick, we have a team of experts to help you figure out what makes sense based on your architecture.
Then, you send those metrics to the CloudZero telemetry API. The CloudZero platform will leverage our powerful data model to match hourly costs with usage and produce an accurate shared cost allocation, down to the hour.
At CloudZero, we leverage this functionality to measure our cost per feature and cost per customer even though our architecture is multi-tenant and leverages a shared snowflake data warehouse.
For example, we have a telemetry stream that measures the duration of each query running on each of our Snowflake warehouses. Many of our customers use telemetry to measure the duration of queries on a shared database or the time to execute a workload on a shared Kubernetes cluster.
Getting Started
If you’re interested in accurately allocating your spend, 
. We can have a conversation about which telemetry streams might make sense for you based on your architecture and help you understand what new kinds of cost intelligence you could gain by partnering with CloudZero.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
