Use AWS Tags in CloudZero

CloudZero allocates costs using metadata already in your AWS bill, including accounts, services, regions, and usage types. If your organization also uses AWS resource tags, you can activate them as cost allocation tags so they appear as filtering and grouping options in the CloudZero Explorer.

To learn how CloudZero organizes cost data from tags and other metadata into business categories, see Overview of Cost Allocation with Dimensions.

What you need

• Access to the management account in your AWS Organization (only the management account can activate cost allocation tags)
• If your team has not started tagging resources, see Tagging AWS resources in the AWS documentation

Step 1: Open Cost Allocation Tags in AWS

1. Sign into your management account in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
2. In the left navigation under Cost Organization, select Cost Allocation Tags.

Step 2: Activate tags

The Cost Allocation Tags page lists all available tags across your organization. Use the search box to find specific tags.

1. Search for the tags you want to activate. See the tags to activate section below for common starting points.
2. Select the checkbox next to each tag you want to activate.
3. Select Activate.

For more details on cost allocation tags, see Organizing and tracking costs using AWS cost allocation tags in the AWS documentation.

Which tags to activate

Any tag that appears on the Cost Allocation Tags page can be activated for use in CloudZero. There are two types:

Your custom resource tags are the tags your team applies to AWS resources. If your organization already tags resources, you can activate those tags here to use them as additional allocation, filtering, and grouping options in CloudZero. Common examples include:

• team, department, or cost-center for ownership
• environment or env for separating production, staging, and development
• project or application for tracking costs by initiative
• service for mapping costs to your organization's own services or products

AWS-generated tags are created by AWS services automatically. If these tags exist in your environment, activating them adds infrastructure-level context to your cost data:

What to expect

After you activate tags, AWS includes them in your Cost and Usage Report starting with the next billing period. CloudZero picks up the new tags during the next data ingest, which happens within 24 hours. Once available, the tags appear as allocation, filtering, and grouping options in the Explorer.