Use tags to allocate costs for shared services - Resource Management

The costs of shared services, such as Alibaba Cloud CDN (CDN), Object Storage Service (OSS), and Internet Shared Bandwidth, are allocated at a finer-grained level rather than the instance level. For example, the costs of CDN are allocated at the domain name level, those of OSS are allocated at the bucket level, and those of Internet Shared Bandwidth are allocated at the elastic IP address (EIP) level. This topic describes how to use tags to allocate costs for this type of service.

Step 1: Add a tag to resources

You can use one of the following methods to add a tag to a resource:

Perform operations in a console: You can add tags to resources on the Tag page of the Resource Management console or in the consoles of Alibaba Cloud services.
Use an API operation: You can call the TagResources operation of the Tag service or the related operation of an Alibaba Cloud service to add a tag to a resource.
- For more information about the TagResources operation of the Tag service, see TagResources.
- For more information about the related operation of an Alibaba Cloud service, see the documentation of the Alibaba Cloud service.
Use CloudOps Orchestration Service (OOS): You can use OOS to add tags to multiple resources at a time. For more information, see Use OOS to add tags to multiple ECS instances at a time.

In this example, the tag Project:Entertainment is created and added to buckets in the OSS console to identify resources of the entertainment project department.

Log on to the OSS console.
In the left-side navigation pane, click Buckets.
On the Buckets page, find the bucket to which you want to add a tag, move the pointer over the icon in the Tag column, and then click Edit.
On the page that appears, click Create Tag in the Bucket Tagging section.
Enter a tag key and a tag value, and click Save. In this example, the tag key is Project and the tag value is Entertainment.
View the tag that is added to the bucket.

Step 2: Enable the cost allocation tag

You can view a tag on pages such as the Split Bill page and the Cost Center page in the Expenses and Costs console only after you enable the tag as a cost allocation tag. In this example, the cost allocation tag whose tag key is Project is enabled.

Go to the Cost allocation tags page in the Expenses and Costs console. If you do not enable the cost allocation tag feature, enable the feature as prompted.
On the Cost allocation tags page, find the tag and enable it as a cost allocation tag.
Important
You can view the tag on the Cost allocation tags page in the Expenses and Costs console one day after the tag is added to resources.

Step 3: Create a rule for automatically allocating resources to a cost center

On the Cost Center page in Expenses and Costs console, create a rule to automatically allocate resources to a cost center based on the cost allocation tag.

Go to the Cost Center page in the Expenses and Costs console. If you do not enable the cost center feature, enable the feature as prompted.
On the Cost Center page, click the + icon in the left-side navigation tree to create a cost center.
If no rule is available in the cost center, click Create Rule. Otherwise, click Edit to edit the existing rule.
Configure a rule to automatically allocate resources to the cost center based on the cost allocation tag.
- Select Tag for Condition.
- Select the tag key. In this example, the tag key Project is selected.
- Select the tag value. In this example, the tag value Entertainment is selected.
For more information, see Allocate resources by using an automatic allocation rule.
View the automatically allocated resources.
Important
You can view the automatically allocated resources in the cost center one day after the rule is created.