Documentation Grafana Cloud Cost management and billing Generate usage reports

Cost Attribution

Grafana Cloud cost attribution enables you to monitor and allocate usage costs for Cloud Metrics, Logs, and Traces across teams, services, departments, or systems. This feature provides detailed visibility into telemetry consumption, empowering you to manage costs more effectively. By distributing accountability for observability costs, it shifts the burden from a single centralized business unit to a shared responsibility across your organization.

With cost attribution, you gain the insights needed to optimize telemetry usage, improve financial planning, and promote accountability across your organization.

Identify labels for attributing costs

Cost attribution relies on labels (sometimes referred to as “attributes” in the context of tracing) on your telemetry. Unlabeled or improperly labeled data cannot be properly attributed. The labels you select for attributing costs depend on your specific use case and the labeling conventions.

To configure the labels you’d like to use for cost attribution, contact Customer Support. We currently restrict the number of labels to a maximum of 2 and the combined cardinality of those two labels to 1000. You should try to pick a label key that is applied to the majority of your telemetry data. If, for example, the label you choose is only applied to 2% of your telemetry, 98% of your usage and spend will be classified as “unattributed”, which means we don’t know who that telemetry came from because it was missing the specified labels.

You can review your currently configured cost attribution labels on the Configuration screen within the Attributions page.

View and download your cost attribution report

After your cost attribution labels are configured and applied to your ingested telemetry data, you can view the cost allocation details on the Overview page of the Attributions screen. The Overview page can be found under Administration > Cost Management > Metrics > View usage attribution reports.

Attribution data for the current month is available during the month but should be considered an estimate of month-to-date usage and cost. Final cost attribution data for a given month is confirmed after the month concludes, typically on the first day of the following month.

In addition to viewing the data in the Grafana Cloud UI, you can also download this data as a CSV file for integration into your financial reporting tools.

Cost attribution begins collecting data only from the moment it is enabled; historical data cannot be backfilled. If you enable cost attribution partway through a month, the reported costs will only reflect data from that point forward. As a result, the totals may not match the billing dashboard for that month.

Unattributed telemetry

Any metrics, logs, or traces received that are not tagged with the labels used for cost attribution are counted towards the “unattributed” category shown in the UI.

Permissions

Cost attribution is only available to “Grafana Admin” level users.

Cost attribution across stacks

Cost attribution is configured and computed on a per-stack basis, not per-organization. The UI shows attribution information for the stack in which you are viewing it. Comparing values from the cost attribution UI to the Billing/Usage dashboard may not match, as the Billing/Usage dashboard contains information both at the stack level and the org level.