Automatic Allocations

allocation rules allocation rules give you a powerful way to organize, label, and allocate cloud costs across providers, accounts, and environments using custom logic instead of relying solely on native cloud provider tags, you can define rules that reflect how your organization actually operates this is especially valuable in environments where tagging is inconsistent or incomplete why allocation rules are needed many enterprises struggle with incomplete or inconsistent tagging across teams and platforms while native cloud tags can be helpful, they often fall short in providing complete visibility into cost and usage common challenges include resources that are untagged or inconsistently tagged tagging practices that differ across platforms, teams, or accounts inability to retroactively tag historical data difficulty attributing shared or multi tenant infrastructure business needs that go beyond native tag structures these limitations make it hard to allocate costs accurately, identify trends, and hold teams accountable for cloud usage how allocation rules help allocation rules solve these issues by letting you define cost attribution logic that operates independently of the source data rules can be applied retroactively and layered to support complex business structures with allocation rules, you can apply consistent tagging logic across providers like aws, azure, and gcp normalize inconsistent tag keys and values across teams enrich untagged resources using metadata like account id, region, or service name assign meaning to legacy or historical data without modifying the original export build hierarchical rules that align with your organization’s structure allocation rules act as an overlay to your cloud cost data, enabling clear, structured reporting without requiring changes to how cloud resources are provisioned or tagged how allocation rules work in amberflo each allocation rule is built around a key (such as environment or team) and a set of matching conditions that define how values are assigned these conditions can be based on metadata like cloud provider sub account or subscription id region service name resource id cloud tag keys and values you can define multiple conditions for a single rule and assign matching costs to a specific business unit example use cases here are a few practical ways to use allocation rules combine resources tagged as prod and prod east into a single production environment normalize aws env=staging and gcp label env=staging to a unified staging value attribute internal tools and customer facing apps separately, even across different platforms group infrastructure costs tied to a specific region or initiative, regardless of provider or service building an allocation rule in amberflo create a label give your rule a clear name that describes the purpose (e g , “production workloads”) add a description (optional) use this to provide context for others viewing or editing the rule later select the provider choose which provider this rule applies to (aws, azure, gcp, etc) choose a field select the metadata to match against cloud tags (labels) service region id sub account id (subscription) resource id set the value choose the specific value of the field you are looking for for example, select the specific sub account you want to allocate the costs from note if you choose cloud tags you will be asked to pick a tag and then select the value you are interested in for example, tag=environment and value=development assign a business unit choose the business unit that should be charged for matching usage you can add additional conditions (optional) you can layer conditions for more specificity for example, allocate compute usage to a business unit only if it occurs in a specific region