Cost and Usage Report Requirements

Your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the source of billing data that CloudZero uses to show your AWS costs. If your account already has a CUR, verify it matches the settings below. An existing report is preferred because CloudZero can access your historical cost data. If you have an existing report with historical data in a different format, reach out to your account manager to bring that data into CloudZero.

The automated setup detects a compatible Cost and Usage Report and connects to it. If it can't find one, it creates a new report for you.

Required settings

For CloudZero to ingest data from a Cost and Usage Report, the report must use these settings:

Recommended settings

These settings are not required but help keep your S3 bucket organized:

For more on configuring AWS Cost and Usage Reports, see Creating reports in the AWS documentation.

Tag handling in Parquet CUR

When AWS writes a Parquet CUR, it normalizes tag column names by converting them to lowercase and replacing non-alphanumeric characters with underscores. This happens before CloudZero receives the file. CSV CUR preserves the original tag keys.

If you have multiple active cost allocation tag keys that differ only by capitalization or punctuation (for example, Environment and environment, or cz-owner and cz:owner), they collapse into a single tag in CloudZero. The surviving tag is the first one returned by AWS; the others are not visible.

• Tag values on each resource are preserved if you apply only one variant per resource (the common case).
• Filtering or grouping by the collapsed tag returns no results in CloudZero because it does not exist as a separate column.
• If both variants are applied to the same resource, AWS keeps only one value when writing the Parquet file.

To check whether any of your tags collide, open Billing > Cost allocation tags in the AWS Console, filter for Active user-defined tags, and look for keys that match after converting to lowercase and replacing non-alphanumeric characters with underscores.

To preserve full tag-key fidelity, either standardize your tag keys so each concept uses one consistent form, or use CSV CUR instead of Parquet.