Use tags to manage costs - Resource Management - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

In most cases, the managers of cloud resources need to split bills by business departments. This facilitates internal settlement. For example, your enterprise has only one Alibaba Cloud account, and all the enterprise resources are purchased by using this account. The financial department wants to allocate the costs of these resources from the cost center, department, and project dimensions. In this case, you can use the Tag service to add tags to your resources. Then, use the cost analysis feature provided by Alibaba Cloud to query bills from each dimension. This helps you manage costs based on tags.

Background information

You can query the costs of your resources on the Cost Analysis page in the Expenses and Costs console about one day after you update tags for or add tags to your resources. For more information, see Cost analysis.
Many Alibaba Cloud services support tags. For more information, see Services that work with Tag.

Step 1: Plan tags

Tags help you efficiently manage resources. You can use tags to mark resources from dimensions such as business attributes, owners, or costs. To plan an appropriate tag system, you can reference the tag design principles and examples provided in Best practices for tag design. You can plan the tags listed in the following table for your resources.

Business dimension	Tag (`tag key:tag value`)
Cost center	`costcenter:Beijing` `costcenter:Shanghai` `costcenter:Hangzhou`
Department	`department:Dev` `department:Test` `department:Ops`
Project	`project:project A` `project:project B`

Step 2: Create tags and add them to resources

Create tags and add them to resources.

Log on to the Resource Management console.
In the left-side navigation pane, choose Tag > Tag. On the Tag page, click Create Tag.
In the Create Tag dialog box, create tags.
Create different tags for resources that belong to different cost centers, departments, and projects based on the plan in Step 1: Plan tags.
Click Add Tags to Resources in the upper part of the Tag page. In the dialog box that appears, select the resources to which you want to add tags and click Add Tag. In the Add Tag dialog box, select the tags that you want to add to the resources and click OK.
For example, add the tags costcenter:Beijing, department:Dev, and project:project A to the resources that are used for Project A of the development department of the Beijing cost center.

Note

You can use CloudOps Orchestration Service (OOS) to add the tags to multiple resources at a time. For more information, see Use OOS to add tags to multiple ECS instances at a time.
You can add tags to resources in the consoles of the Alibaba Cloud services that support tags. For more information, see the user guide of each cloud service.
You can add tags to resources by calling a Tag API operation. For more information, see TagResources.

Step 3: Enable cost allocation tags

Configure dimensions for cost analysis based on your business requirements, and specify cost allocation tags.

Initial setup

Go to the Cost allocation tags page in the Expenses and Costs console.
On the Cost allocation tags page, read the description of cost allocation tags and click Next.
Specify the tags that are added in Step 2: Create tags and add them to resources as cost allocation tags and click Next.
Click Enable.

Ongoing management

Go to the Cost allocation tags page of the Expenses and Costs console.
Find the tag you added in Step 2: Create tags and add them to resources and click Enable in the Operations column.

Step 4: Query the costs of resources

Query the costs of resources based on the cost allocation tags.

Go to the Cost Analysis page in the Expenses and Costs console. If you do not enable the cost analysis feature provided by Alibaba Cloud, enable the feature as prompted.
On the Cost Analysis page, specify filter conditions to query the costs.
- Example 1: Query the costs of three cost centers
  1. Select Instance Tag from the Category drop-down list.
  2. Select costcenter from the Tag Key drop-down list.
  3. Select Month from the Time Unit drop-down list.
  4. Configure the start time and end time. The upper limit of the time range is 12 months.
- Example 2: Query the costs of a project
  1. In the Filters section on the right, click Tag.
  2. Select tags. For example, you can select the tag project:project A to query the costs of Project A.
    You can select multiple tags. The logical relationship between the tags is OR.
  3. Click Apply.
(Optional) Click Export in the upper-right corner of the bill. Then, a cost report is exported in the CSV format.

Resource Management:Use tags to manage costs