CloudZero dimensions allow you to understand all the costs of operating cloud software in the ways that matter to your business.

An organization using CloudZero has many dimensions. Each dimension is one business-relevant way to understand spend. You can use them to take actions such as the following:

• Group and filter spend in the Explorer.
• Receive updates by Slack or email through Views.
• Allocate costs, such as cost per customer, cost per feature, cost per team, and so on.

All dimensions begin with charges. A charge is the dollar amount that the cloud provider billed for a given thing at a given time. Elements are the values that a charge may have in a dimension. For example, us-east-1 is an element of the Region dimension. In practice, elements are usually referred to using the dimension name. For example:

• us-east-1 is a Region in the Region dimension.
• Billing is a Feature in a custom Feature dimension.

Types of Dimensions

CloudZero supports two main types of dimension:

• Custom dimensions
• Core dimensions

Custom Dimensions

Custom dimensions are user-defined dimensions that allow you to view cloud costs in the context of your business and engineering needs, enabling better cost analysis. You can use custom dimensions to filter and allocate costs by custom business bucket, such as product, microservice, engineering team, and more.

To define a custom dimension, you combine core dimensions in a YAML file using the CostFormation language. The elements in a custom dimension are created through an allocation telemetry stream or defined in the CostFormation file.

To learn more about using CostFormation to create custom dimensions, see Guide to Using the CostFormation Definition Language and the CostFormation Language Reference.

Core Dimensions

Core dimensions are built-in dimensions provided by CloudZero, derived from cloud provider data such as billing line items or resource properties. They are split into several subtypes that you can use as a source for creating custom dimensions.

To learn how to use each subtype in CostFormation, see the following documentation:

• Cloud Provider Billing Dimensions: Sourced directly from your cloud provider's billing data.
• Additional Cloud Provider Dimensions: Defined by CloudZero, based on your cloud provider's billing data.
• Tag Dimensions: Compiled dynamically from the list of tags CloudZero receives from your cloud provider.
• Kubernetes Dimensions: Compiled dynamically through data CloudZero receives from a Kubernetes integration.

Using Dimensions in CloudZero

You can use core and custom dimensions throughout CloudZero to understand your costs in the Explorer or to keep organization members updated about relevant spend through Views. For more information, see the following documentation:

• Explorer
• Views