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Multi-Cloud Account Management

Many Principal Investigators (PIs) manage multiple cloud accounts. The FinOps toolkit allows PIs to view all accounts collectively, drill down into specific accounts, and manage common funding sources.

Funding Accounts: In the FinOps toolkit, an account can take two forms:

1. Linked Account/Subscription with costs: An actual account incurring its own cloud costs.
2. Funding-only account: An account used solely for funding other cloud accounts, with no costs of its own (available based on ongoing toolkit development).

Transferring Funds Between Accounts: PIs can transfer obligated funds between Linked Accounts within the same commercial cloud provider.

• The amount is subtracted from the source account and added to the receiving account.
• Note: Transferring funds between different commercial clouds (e.g., AWS to Azure) requires ARC support to process.

Allocating Funds to Subprojects

Within a Linked Account, a PI can allocate funds to subprojects.

• All resources used by the subproject must be labeled with a user:Project cost tag.
• Funds are subtracted from the Linked Account balance and added to the Subproject balance.

Handling Shared Resources Among Subprojects: When projects share common resources, you can label them with a user:Project tag identifying the sharing projects, or identify that all unlabeled costs should be shared. Shared costs can be allocated three ways:

1. Fixed percentage: Specific percentages for each project (e.g., 40% to A, 60% to B).
2. Equal distribution: Divided equally among all projects.
3. Proportional allocation: Distributed based on each project's share of total tagged costs.

Budget Allocation to Any Cost Tag

The FinOps toolkit allows budget allocation to any cost tag you use.

• Warning: The toolkit actively prevents allocating funds to multiple cost tags if it would result in double deductions. Avoid creating new tags after budget allocations are already in place for the current cycle to maintain accounting accuracy.

User Access and Permissions

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is designed to give you highly detailed visibility into exactly where your budget is going. Rather than just viewing a single total, you can break down your costs by several categories:

• Linked Account: The specific AWS account where your cloud resources are running.
• Product/Service: The specific tool being used (e.g., EC2 for compute, S3 for storage).
• Seller: Whether the cost originated from AWS directly or the AWS Marketplace.
• Usage Type & Quantity: Exactly how the service was consumed (e.g., data transfer vs. compute hours) and the volume used.

You can easily switch your view to display these metrics by cost (dollars) or by usage quantity. For example, you can switch your view to display the data downloaded out of S3 in gigabytes rather than its cost in dollars.

Combining Filters

If you select multiple categories at once, the dashboard will narrow your view to display only the costs that match all of your selections. For instance, if you want to know exactly how much data was downloaded out of your storage, you could combine filters to show Service = S3 and Usage Type = DataTransfer‑Out‑Bytes.

Cost Tag Analysis

One of the most powerful ways to track spending is by using cost tags (such as user:Project or user:User). Cost tags enable you to drill down and answer specific administrative questions, such as:

• “How much did John Doe spend this month?”
• “What did John Doe spend specifically on Project X?”

The system carefully organizes your data by these service categories and tag values to prevent charging the same expense twice. In the future, enhancements to the dashboard will also analyze how thoroughly your resources are tagged, helping you ensure that all resources in your account are being properly categorized

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