Connecting to Elastic Cloud

Connect your Elastic Cloud account to CloudZero to bring your Elastic Cloud cost and usage data into a unified view of all your cloud and AI spend. CloudZero organizes your Elastic Cloud 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 creating an Elastic Cloud API key and configuring the connection in CloudZero. CloudZero pulls itemized cost data directly from the Elastic Cloud billing API, broken down by product (Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM, and others), so no manual rate entry is required. The connection supports both hosted deployments and serverless projects (self-hosted Elasticsearch is not supported).

What you need

• CloudZero user with data configuration permissions
• Elastic Cloud account with the Organization owner role (required to create API keys)
• Your Elastic Cloud Organization ID (a whole number, found on the API Keys page)

Each connection is scoped to a single Elastic Cloud organization. If you have multiple organizations, create a separate connection for each.

Step 1: Create an Elastic Cloud API key

For full details, see Elastic's API key documentation.

1. In Elastic Cloud, go to Account > API Keys.

2. Copy your Organization ID from this page. You will need it in Step 2.

3. Select Create API key.

4. Assign the following roles to the API key:

   • Organization-level: Billing admin
   • Cloud resource access: Viewer or higher for all deployment types (Deployment, Elasticsearch, Observability, and Security)

   An Organization admin role covers all of these. For details on roles, see Elastic's user roles documentation.

5. Select Create API key and copy the key value.

Step 2: Configure the connection in CloudZero

1. In CloudZero, go to Settings > Cloud Connections.
2. Select Create Connection + and select the Elastic Cloud tile.
3. Enter a Connection Name to identify this connection in CloudZero (for example, Elastic Cloud Production).
4. Enter your Organization ID from Step 1.
5. Enter the API Key you created in Step 1.
6. Select Save.

What to expect

After you save the connection, CloudZero begins pulling your Elastic Cloud cost data:

• New connection: CloudZero pulls up to 12 months of historical billing data if available.
• Re-enabled connection: CloudZero pulls up to 24 months of billing data, starting from the current period back to the last previously ingested period.
• Steady state: CloudZero re-ingests the current and previous month on each run.

Cost data appears across the platform within 24 hours.

Connection details

Tags

The Elastic Cloud connection includes the following tags for use in Dimensions:

Usage data

CloudZero ingests every itemized line item from the Elastic Cloud billing API. Each line item includes cost, usage amount, and unit, grouped by product kind (elasticsearch, kibana, apm, appsearch, enterprise_search, integrations_server) and SKU.