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Costory Concepts

Costory’s main interface for exploring cloud costs across all connected providers. Supports filtering, grouping by any dimension, multiple metrics, formulas, event overlays, drill-downs, saved views, alerts, and dashboard creation. Not to be confused with AWS Cost Explorer, which is AWS’s own native billing tool.Related: Explorer
A Cost Report element that breaks period-over-period cost changes into a tree by the dimensions you choose (for example provider, team, service name, or project), ranks movers by dollar impact, and can attach an AI narrative for Slack, email, and in-app Summary, Tree, or Table views.Related: Digest | Cost Reports | Monthly Cloud Cost Reporting
The hierarchical structure used in a Cost digest to organize cost data. Report Group By sets the first level. Additional group-by dimensions add deeper levels (for example Provider, then Environment, then Service Name).Related: Digest | Monthly Cloud Cost Reporting
A saved view made of one or more Explorer widgets. Each widget keeps its own metric, formula, filters, group-by, selected period, and event context.Related: Dashboards | Share cost views
Costory reporting fields used to filter, group, allocate, scope, alert, and report on costs. A dimension can merge several native tags or labels into one field, such as aws:Environment, env, and environment into Environment.Related: Dimensions | Env Allocation | EKS cost allocation
Rule-based dimensions whose output values are defined in Costory. For example, a Team virtual dimension can route rows where project_id starts with eng- to Engineering, and route everything else to Platform without requiring that tag to exist in any cloud account.Related: Dimensions | Shared Cost Allocation | Reallocate API Costs
A split of shared cost by actual usage (for example storage or CPU hours per team) rather than by shares written in advance. On a virtual dimension this is a metric rule. On an enrichment (beta) it is a lookup file that points at a BigQuery table.Related: Shared Cost Allocation | Enrichments | Dimensions | Reallocate API Costs
Costory’s unified billing schema. All normalized fields are prefixed with cos_ so you can query across AWS, GCP, and Azure using the same field names instead of learning each provider’s billing export format.Related: Standard Columns
An automatically recurring cost report delivered to Slack, Teams, or email on a weekly or monthly cadence. Created from any saved Explorer view.Related: Cost Reports | Decentralize FinOps
A saved configuration of Explorer with specific metrics, filters, group-bys, date ranges, formulas, and event context. Views can be shared, scheduled as reports, or turned into dashboard widgets.Related: Explorer | Dashboards | Cost Reports | Share cost views
Per-user access on a Costory object such as a dashboard, report, or alert. Reader can view. Editor can view and edit. Can manage can edit and change who has access. New objects start private.Related: Share cost views
Beta connector. Costory reads BigQuery job metadata, attaches it to GCP billing lines, and reallocates slot cost to the user who ran the job. On-demand Analysis and reservation spend then sit in one Explorer view. Distinct from Enrichments, which are lookup files.Related: BigQuery jobs | GCP Billing Setup

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Cloud Billing

The process of assigning shared or untagged cloud costs to specific teams, products, or environments. The central challenge of FinOps. You can’t optimize what you can’t attribute.Related: Tag & Allocate Costs | Shared Cost Allocation | Reallocate API Costs
Billing internal teams for their actual share of shared cloud costs. Money moves between budgets. See also: Showback.
Showing teams what they would be charged without actually moving money between budgets. Lighter than chargeback. The goal is awareness and accountability rather than internal billing.Related: Decentralize FinOps
Financial metrics expressed on a per-unit basis: cost per customer, cost per API call, cost per transaction. They show whether you are getting more efficient as you scale, not just whether you are spending more.Related: Unit Economics | Relate Costs to Usage | Unit Economics with Amplitude
Slot-hours per TiB billed for a BigQuery job or workload (query_compute_ms relative to query_bytes_billed). High intensity means the query used a lot of slots relative to the data it scanned.Related: BigQuery jobs | Unit Economics
The cost to serve one additional unit of value: one more user, one more customer, one more request. In cloud terms, production cost divided by your usage metric. Useful for exec reporting because it shows efficiency trends even when total spend grows.Related: Executive Reporting
Tags that cloud providers require you to explicitly activate before they appear in billing exports. In AWS, you must enable them in the Billing console. A common gotcha: you tagged your resources, but forgot to activate the tags for billing, so they don’t show up in cost reports.Related: AWS Setup
AWS’s detailed billing export, the raw data source for AWS cost analysis. A Parquet file that contains every line item of your AWS bill. Costory ingests this automatically once connected.Related: AWS Setup
An AWS feature that breaks down container costs (EKS, ECS) to individual pod labels. Without this, you only see the total cost of the EC2 instances running your cluster, not what each workload costs. Must be enabled in AWS CUR settings.Related: EKS cost allocation
The usage quantity on the Databricks bill. Costory ingests DBU rows from system.billing.usage and prices them from your system.billing.list_prices export for direct contracts, or splits marketplace spend from your cloud bill when you pay through AWS, Azure, or GCP.Related: Databricks setup
A storage-based, pull-only integration. You export Databricks system tables to storage you own; Costory reads that prefix with a read-only grant. Level 1 shows DBU billing in Costory. Level 2 matches each cloud instance to the Databricks cluster and job that ran on it and combines DBU and VM cost for the full price of a workload. Not the same as Enrichments lookup files.Related: Databricks setup

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Cloud Pricing

The sticker price: each resource billed at its standard on-demand rate, without applying any volume discounts or commitments. What you’d pay if you had no Savings Plans or Reserved Instances.Related: Currency Conversion
Spreads upfront commitment payments (Savings Plans, Reserved Instances) evenly across the commitment period. Instead of showing a $36,000 spike on the purchase date, it shows $1,000/month for 3 years. Usually the most useful cost metric for monthly reporting.Related: Currency Conversion
The same as above, but after applying credits, EDP discounts, and refunds. Represents what you actually pay out of pocket. If your company has negotiated discounts with AWS, this is the number that matches reality.
A commitment to use a specific instance type for 1 or 3 years in exchange for significant discounts (up to 72% off on-demand). Less flexible than Savings Plans, locked to a specific instance type and region.
AWS’s flexible commitment-based pricing. You commit to a consistent amount of compute usage (in $/hour) for 1 or 3 years and get discounted rates. More flexible than RIs, not locked to a specific instance type. However, Savings Plan discounts can shift between accounts daily, causing misleading cost fluctuations. See Why Contracted Cost.
An AWS program where large customers commit to a minimum total spend in exchange for a blanket discount on all services. Typically negotiated annually. Costory’s Contracted Cost metric preserves EDP pricing while stripping out volatile Savings Plan discounts.
Discounts or promotional amounts applied to your cloud bill by the provider: startup credits, support credits, migration incentives. Important to track separately in exec reports because they mask true cost trends.Related: Executive Reporting
Third-party software bought through AWS, GCP, or Azure Marketplace (Datadog, MongoDB, etc.). These show up on your cloud bill but aren’t infrastructure costs, often need to be excluded when calculating production cost metrics.

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Kubernetes Cost Terms

  • Requests: the resources (CPU, memory) a pod guarantees it needs. Used for scheduling: the scheduler uses requests to decide which node a pod runs on.
  • Limits: the maximum a pod can consume before the kernel kills it.
Costory calculates waste based on requests, not limits, because requests are what you’re actually paying for on each node.Related: K8s Waste Reduction
The gap between what your nodes provide and what your pods have requested. Formula: available resources - total requests = waste. Costory converts this to dollars using a 9:1 CPU-to-memory cost ratio. If your cluster has 40% waste, you’re paying for 40% more capacity than your workloads need.Related: K8s Waste Reduction
Waste expressed as a percentage of total cluster or node pool capacity. The key metric for identifying over-provisioned clusters.Related: K8s Waste Reduction

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Reporting & Analysis

Automatic identification of unusual cost spikes. Costory goes beyond simple threshold alerts by using ML models trained on your historical data, with seasonality awareness and event correlation, to determine whether a spike is genuinely abnormal.Related: Monthly Cloud Cost Reporting
Aligning technical or business events (deployments, incidents, RI purchases, marketing campaigns) with cost timelines to explain why costs changed. Turns “costs went up 15%” into “costs went up 15% after the v2.3 deploy on Tuesday.”Related: Events | Event Correlations | Events Setup
A spending target set for a team, project, or cloud account over a given period. Costory lets you automate budget tracking by combining virtual dimensions with scheduled reports, so stakeholders get alerted before overruns happen, not after the invoice arrives.Related: Automate Budget Tracking
The finance function responsible for budgeting and forecasting. The people who will ask you “why did cloud costs go up?” and expect a number, not a Grafana dashboard. Costory helps you speak their language.
A visualization showing how individual factors contribute to an overall change: which services, accounts, or teams drove a cost increase or decrease. Answers “where did the extra $10k come from?” at a glance.Related: Explorer
Last modified on October 26, 2026