Getting Started

How to build your first cost stream.

How to Get Started with Cost Streams

Cost Streams is a dynamic cost allocation and intelligence tool, empowering teams with greater visibility, control, and insights into every facet of their cloud spend—down to products, teams, or any organizational layer you need.

To get the most from Cost Streams, it's important to understand its hierarchy and workflow. Here’s a step-by-step structured guide:

Cost Streams Hierarchy & Concepts

Views Think of each View like a browser tab:

• Each view is a private workspace, with its own business units and stream logic.

• Use separate views for any department or team that needs a unique lens on cloud spend.

Business Units (BUs)

• A business unit is a grouping that will receive a share of costs from streams.

• They respect accounting and cost allocation principles where lower level streams cannot be assigned to a BU if the higher level stream is already assigned, disabling any double accounting errors.

• You assign streams directly to BUs.

• For highly granular BU allocation, create more downstream split boxes and assign at that level.

• Defined a budget to your BU which will automatically track your spend and alert anyone assigned to the BU.

• Define a cohort (group of users) to your BU, in order to receive notifications on your curated spend health.

Streams

• Streams channel spend and intelligence using your chosen split logic.

• Splits can be as simple or as granular as you like; add new filters or sub-splits to refine cost distribution.

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Getting Started: Building Your First CostsStreams Logic

Cost Streams is enabled by default for all North accounts.

1. Create & Name a View

   • Click to add a new view and name it according to your department, team, or reporting purpose.

2. Start with the Root Account Costs

   • From within your view, begin with the root box that represents your total cloud spend.

3. Split and Filter

   • Add filters and splits to the root box to allocate costs by tags, projects, environments, or other attributes.

   • To further subdivide any allocation, create new sub-boxes (subsplits) under any existing split.

   • There’s no limit to how deep or granular your splits can go.

4. Create Business Units

   • At the top of the page, create all necessary BUs that should receive cost allocations (e.g., teams, divisions).

5. Assign Streams/Boxes to Business Units

   • At the stream (box) level, use the “Assign to Business Unit” button (the middle button) to connect each box’s costs to the relevant BU.

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Example Cost Streams Setup

1. Marketing View:

   • Filters spend by campaign and region.

   • Boxes split by cloud tags (env, campaign_id).

2. R&D View:

   • Splits by environment, then project.

   • Subboxes go as granular as needed for cost allocation control.

3. Business Units:

   • “Europe Engineering,” “US Marketing,” etc.

   • Stream boxes assigned according to need.