How Costfluent works
Costfluent reads billing data from your cloud accounts, stores it as one normalized cost record, and answers every report, budget and alert from that record. Nothing is written back to your accounts.
Organization
The organization is your company's account. It holds the people, the teams, the plan and the connections to your cloud accounts. Everyone who signs in belongs to one organization with one organization role; see Access model.
Workspaces
A workspace holds the costs, reports and budgets for one part of your business. Onboarding creates the first one, and you can add more under Settings, then Workspaces. Cost reports, dashboards, folders, budgets, alerts, segments and virtual tags all belong to one workspace. Each workspace also sets how it presents currency (Currency settings) and whether it syncs automatically (Automatic syncing).
Connections
A connection is one cloud account, billing account or cluster Costfluent reads from: an AWS account, an Azure billing scope, a Google Cloud billing export or a Kubernetes cluster. A connection is made once for the organization and then enabled in the workspaces that should see its cost, so two workspaces can report on the same account without connecting it twice. See Manage connections.
Costfluent reads through the access each provider page describes: a read-only IAM role on AWS, read access to cost data on Azure and Google Cloud, and an agent that reports usage on Kubernetes. It does not create, change or stop resources.
The cost record
Each collection turns the provider's billing lines into cost records in one shape, based on the FinOps FOCUS specification: the charge date, the provider, the sub-account, the service, the region, the resource, the charge category, the billed and effective cost, the billing currency and the resource's tags. Because every provider lands in the same shape, one report can compare AWS, Azure and Google Cloud line by line, and a CSV export can use FOCUS column names.
A newer collection of the same day replaces the earlier one rather than adding to it, so a day's figure settles as the provider finalizes its bill.
Reports and everything built on them
- A cost report is a saved question over the cost record: a time range, filters, one grouping and what the total counts.
- A dashboard pins several saved cost reports side by side.
- A budget compares spend for a period with an amount you set.
- An alert watches a threshold and records when it fires.
- Segments and virtual tags are rules evaluated when a report is read, so editing one restates past months at once without collecting anything again.