---
title: "Why attribute telemetry cost by team? | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understand how the team attribute becomes a metrics label that Cost Management and Billing uses to attribute cost by team."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Why attribute telemetry cost by team?

Your collectors send telemetry to Grafana Cloud, and the usage appears as one total. Without a label that identifies who owns the data, you can’t tell which team drives the cost.

Fleet Management already knows who owns each collector through the `team` attribute. Cost Management and Billing attributes cost by labels on your telemetry. To connect the two, you add the `team` attribute to your metrics as a label.

## How the pieces connect

In this path, you work with three parts:

- **Collector attributes**: The `team` attribute you assigned in Fleet Management identifies the owner of each collector.
- **Configuration pipeline**: A pipeline you create reads the `team` attribute of each collector and adds it to the metrics as a `team` label.
- **Cost attribution**: Cost Management and Billing uses the `team` label to report cost per team.

## Benefits of attributing cost by team

Attribute cost by team to gain the following advantages:

- Label metrics from all matching collectors with a single pipeline
- Reuse the `team` attribute you already maintain instead of editing each collector
- See which teams drive metrics cost, and extend the label to logs and traces to see theirs
- Find unattributed cost, which shows where labeling is missing
- Export cost by team for financial reporting

In the next milestone, you create the pipeline that adds the `team` label to your metrics.