Allocate cost to teams
Build showback or chargeback by team, product, or customer from tags, accounts, namespaces, and datasets.
Allocation answers who owns this dollar? Once most spend has an owner, every other OpsLyft feature gets sharper: anomalies route to the right team, opportunities have owners, and budgets alert the people who can act.
Choose how you tell teams apart
| Method | Works best when | OpsLyft reads |
|---|---|---|
| Resource tags | Teams tag what they launch | Your owner tag, such as team |
| Accounts and projects | Each team has its own AWS accounts, Azure subscriptions, or GCP projects | Account ID or name |
| Kubernetes namespaces | Teams share clusters | Namespace, through the cost agent |
| Let Iris suggest | You're not sure | Iris looks for the dimension that best splits spend |
Most organisations combine them: accounts for most spend, tags inside shared accounts, and namespaces inside shared clusters.
Step by step
Measure where you are
Open Live inventory and read the Unallocated tile. In Cost Explorer, open Filter and read the coverage bar for your owner tag.
Tag the biggest untagged spend
Select the Unallocated tile, or Show untagged in the summary line. Sort by Cost/mo and tag from the top. The first few dozen resources usually carry most of the untagged cost.
Map what you can't tag
Some cost can't carry tags: support fees, data transfer, shared clusters, marketplace charges. Upload a mapping as a dataset, such as Chargeback overrides or Org hierarchy, and map its team column.
Build a team lens
Create a lens such as team → Service → Resource ID.
Build a showback canvas
Ask Iris to Build a canvas of cost by team this month vs last month, with each team's top 5 services. Share it with team leads.
Track coverage over time
Add a widget from the tag_coverage platform dataset to watch coverage rise.
Shared costs
Split shared costs by a driver that reflects how teams consume them:
| Shared cost | Good driver |
|---|---|
| Kubernetes cluster | Requested CPU and memory by namespace |
| Data transfer | Bytes by source workload |
| Support fees | Share of total spend |
| Shared databases | Queries or connections by team |
Keep idle capacity as its own line so teams see what they reserve but don't use.
Showback or chargeback?
- Showback shows each team what it costs. Start here.
- Chargeback bills each team's budget. Move to it once coverage is high and teams trust the numbers.
Aim for 90% before chargeback
Teams will argue about whatever sits in unallocated. Get owner coverage high before costs hit team budgets.