Connecting to OpenAI
Connect your OpenAI account to CloudZero to bring your OpenAI cost and usage data into a unified view of all your cloud and AI spend. CloudZero organizes your OpenAI costs, along with your other costs, into categories (called Dimensions) that matter most to your business. For example: business unit, team, product, feature, environment, customer, or virtually anything else. Once connected and organized, you can quickly answer questions about your spend that matter to your stakeholders.
This guide covers connecting through a read-only Admin API key using OpenAI's Costs API.
What you need
- CloudZero user with admin permissions
- An OpenAI Admin API key (requires the Organization Owner role)
- Your OpenAI Organization ID
Step 1: Create a read-only Admin API key in OpenAI
For full details on Admin API keys, see OpenAI's Admin API Keys documentation.
- Sign in to the OpenAI Platform and navigate to Admin Keys.
- Select + Create new Admin Key and give it a descriptive name (for example, "CloudZero Integration").
- Set the permissions to Restricted and grant Read access to the Management API and Usage API scopes.
- Select Create Admin Key.
- Copy the key and store it securely. OpenAI does not display the key again after creation.
Only Organization Owners can create Admin API keys. For details on roles, see OpenAI's Administration overview.
Step 2: Configure the connection in CloudZero
- In CloudZero, go to Settings > Cloud Connections.
- Select Create Connection +.
- Select the OpenAI tile.
- Enter a Connection Name. This label identifies the connection throughout CloudZero.
- Enter your Organization ID. You can find this in the OpenAI Platform under Settings > Organization.
- Enter the Admin API key you created in Step 1.
- Select Create Connection. You are redirected to Cloud Connections, where your new connection is listed.
What to expect
After you connect, CloudZero begins ingesting your OpenAI cost and usage data. CloudZero pulls up to 12 months of historical data on first connection. Your OpenAI costs appear across the platform within 24 hours.
From there, your OpenAI costs work like any other cost data in CloudZero. For example, you can explore them in the Explorer, organize them by team or product using Dimensions, track trends in Dashboards, set Budgets, or ask questions in the AI Hub.
Connection details
Tags
The OpenAI connection provides tags with the openai_cz prefix for use in Dimensions:
| Tag | Description |
|---|---|
openai_cz:organization_id | Your OpenAI organization ID |
openai_cz:project_id | ID of the OpenAI project that generated the cost |
openai_cz:project_name | Name of the OpenAI project that generated the cost |
Cloud Provider Dimensions
Once connected, you can group and filter your OpenAI costs across the platform by the following categories (called Cloud Provider Dimensions):
| Dimension | Example values |
|---|---|
| Account | OpenAI project ID and name from the tags above, displayed as project_id|project_name (for example, abc123|my-project) |
| Service Category | AI and Machine Learning |
| Resource Type | gpt-4.1-2025-04-14: service-usage, web_search_tool_calls: service-usage |
| Usage Family | Standard Tier, Priority Tier, Batch |
| Operation | Input, Output, Cached Input, Embedding, Tool Call |
| Usage Type | Assistants API, Evals, Web Search Tool |
| GenAI Platform | OpenAI |
| GenAI Model | gpt-4.1-2025-04-14, o3-mini-2025-01-31, text-embedding-3-large, web_search_tool_calls |
| GenAI Model Family | GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT Image 1 |
| GenAI Token Type | Input, Output, Cached Input, Text |
Have questions or feedback? Reach out to your account manager.