Cloud Cost Dashboards

Cloud cost dashboards replace the scattered mix of billing consoles, spreadsheets, and monitoring tools with a single, persistent view. Combine cloud costs, usage metrics, budgets, and events on one canvas so your team always has the full picture of cloud spend.

​

Prerequisites

• At least one cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) connected to Costory
• (Optional) Virtual Dimensions configured for team-level or product-level groupings
• (Optional) Usage metrics connected for unit economics widgets (Datadog, Amplitude, BigQuery, etc.)
• (Optional) Teams configured for team-level scopes.

​

Overview

A dashboard is a canvas of widgets, each backed by its own cost query. A saved Cost Explorer view is a single query configuration. A dashboard combines multiple views on the same page: a cost trend next to a budget gauge next to a top-5-services table. Where dashboards fit in your day-to-day:

• Give each team a persistent view of their own spend with showback and chargeback dashboards scoped by Virtual Dimensions
• Share high-level views with leadership that include cost trends, budget tracking, and top cost drivers, without requiring them to learn the Cost Explorer interface
• Track Savings Plan coverage, unit economics, and Kubernetes waste KPIs in one place
• Combine cost data with usage metrics and events on the same canvas to understand why costs changed

​

Creating a dashboard

​

From a template

Costory ships pre-built dashboard templates for common FinOps scenarios so you don’t have to start from scratch. Available templates include:

• CTO / Executive overview: total spend trend, top cost drivers, budget progress, and month-over-month comparison
• Savings Plan & CUD coverage: utilization rates, covered vs. uncovered spend, and coverage trends over time
• Kubernetes cost breakdown: cost by namespace, workload, and waste ratio
• Team cost overview: per-team spend scoped by Virtual Dimension, with period comparison

To apply a template, navigate to Dashboards, click Create Dashboard, and select a template. Costory pre-fills the widgets with your connected billing data. You can customize any widget after creation.

​

Add a widget manually

You can also duplicate an existing widget and adjust its filters to quickly build variations, for example the same cost trend scoped to different teams or services.

​

Widget types

​

Showback and chargeback use cases

Dashboards are the foundation of showback (informational cost visibility) and chargeback (allocating costs to internal budgets). Before building a dashboard, you need the underlying cost allocation in place.

​

Allocate costs to any dimension

Dashboard widgets can group costs by any dimension available in Costory. To enable team-level, product-level, or business-unit groupings, configure Costory’s tagging pipeline first: Virtual Dimensions for rule-based groupings, Feature Engineering for tag cleanup, and Shared Cost Allocation for splitting shared infrastructure. Once configured, those dimensions are available in every widget automatically.

​

Build showback dashboards

A showback dashboard gives a team or business unit a self-service view of their cloud spend. A typical setup follows this pattern:

1. Filter by Virtual Dimension: scope all widgets to a specific team or product using the Virtual Dimensions you’ve configured
2. Include allocated costs: add widgets that show costs from Shared Cost Allocation so the team sees the full picture, including their share of shared infrastructure
3. Add usage metrics for context: place cost-per-user or cost-per-transaction widgets alongside raw spend so teams can assess efficiency, not just total cost
4. Pair with alerts: set up cost alerts on the same dimensions so teams get notified when their spend crosses a threshold

​

Example: Team cost dashboard

A typical team-level dashboard includes:

• Cost trend by service: a line chart filtered to the team’s Virtual Dimension, grouped by cloud service, with a month-over-month comparison
• Budget progress: a progress bar showing how much of the team’s monthly budget has been consumed
• Top 5 cost drivers: a table widget showing the five services or resources with the highest spend
• Savings Plan coverage: a single-value widget displaying the team’s current coverage ratio
• Cost per active user: a custom formula widget dividing cloud spend by DAU from an external usage metric
• Deploy events overlay: cost trend annotated with GitHub deploy events so the team can correlate cost changes with releases

This combination gives the team everything they need (spend trends, budget status, efficiency metrics, and operational context) without leaving a single page. You can create this dashboard once and apply a scope per team using Teams to filter down the cost for each team.

​

Sharing and collaboration

• Every dashboard has a unique URL you can send to teammates or stakeholders.
• Deliver a dashboard summary to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email on a recurring schedule using Slack Reports.
• Assign dashboards to a Team so all members see them by default. Public dashboards are visible org-wide; private dashboards are restricted to team members.
• Schedule a single dashboard to be delivered to multiple team owners, each receiving their own scoped version filtered to their team’s perimeter. One dashboard template, many personalized reports.

• Collaborate in real time: all team members can add, edit, and rearrange widgets on dashboards assigned to their team

​

Frequently Asked Questions

​

Next Steps