Cost Units

Learn more about Cost Units in North.Cloud's Coststreams.

Cost Units is a capability within Coststreams that helps teams measure cloud spend against the business metrics they already care about, such as cost per click, impression, customer, incidents, and more.

Instead of viewing cloud costs in isolation, Cost Units connect infrastructure spend to real business outcomes at the business unit level, updating in near real time. This makes it easier to understand efficiency, track trends, and explain why costs change, not just that they changed.

When to use Cost Units

Use Cost Units when you want to:

• Measure efficiency, such as cost per click or clicks per dollar

• Connect cloud spend to KPIs already used by marketing, product, or finance teams

• Track how efficiency changes over time, daily or monthly

• Bring business metrics and cloud costs into one shared workflow

Cost Units are flexible by design. You define the metric, the direction of the calculation, and the time granularity. There is no fixed schema or prescribed KPI.

To get started with Cost Units

1. Navigate to the Streams tab in app.north.cloud

2. Click Business Unit in the top left corner of the interface

1. Select the business unit you want to analyze

2. A configuration panel will open on the right side of the screen

3. Select Cost Units (next to Analytics and Budget)

4. Create a new Cost Unit by choosing Manual entry or Upload

To import metrics into Cost Units

Cost Units support multiple ways to bring in your business metrics, depending on your workflow.

Upload a file

1. Select Upload

2. Upload a supported file type:

   1. .csv

   2. .xlsx

   3. .numbers

3. Map the metric values to the appropriate dates and business unit

Uploads are commonly used for historical backfills or when metrics already exist in reports or exports.

Manually enter metrics

Manual entry is useful for quick experimentation or when you want full control over the data.

1. Select Manually enter

2. A modal will appear in the center of the screen

3. Enter the following details:

   1. Name: The metric you are tracking (for example, Impressions)

   2. Description: Optional context for your team

   3. Type:

      1. Numerator (metric divided by cost), or

      2. Denominator (cost divided by metric), depending on how you want to measure your Cost Units

   4. Granularity: Daily or monthly

4. Click Continue to add data

5. Select a date range to apply metric values across multiple days or months in a single step

6. Enter your metric values for each date.

   1. For example, number of impressions, clicks, users, or incidents

7. Click Create

View and analyze Cost Units

Once data is uploaded or manually entered, your Cost Units will appear in the Cost Units panel on the right side of the screen.

You can:

• View efficiency as charts or in a list view

• Track average cost over time

• Identify trends and spot spikes or anomalies

• Switch between metric per cost and cost per metric views

Because cloud costs and business metrics update continuously, Cost Units show how efficiency evolves over time rather than providing a static snapshot.

Export Cost Units data

To export Cost Units data:

1. Click Export in the top right corner of the Cost Units card

2. Download the dataset, including your business metric and associated cloud costs

Exports can be used for reporting, sharing, or deeper offline analysis.

Drill deeper with Agent North

In the bottom right corner of the screen, open Agent North to analyze your Cost Units using natural language.

You can ask Agent North to:

• Explain changes in cost per metric

• Surface trends over time

• Investigate spikes or efficiency drops

• Provide context for shifts in performance

Agent North helps translate Cost Units into clear, actionable explanations without exporting data or rebuilding views.