---
title: Glossary of terms
canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/reference/glossary/"
description: "Plain definitions of the words CloudMonitor uses, including the ones that mean something specific here."
---

Words CloudMonitor uses, and what they mean here. Where a term is used differently elsewhere in the
industry, this page gives you CloudMonitor's meaning.

## The ones that trip people up

Three pairs get confused constantly. If you read nothing else, read these.

**Cost allocation rule vs virtual tag.** A **cost allocation rule** decides which cost group a charge
belongs to — it moves money. A **virtual tag** maps the many ways one tag is spelled across your
estate onto a single reporting name — it renames, and moves nothing. You need both, for different
jobs.

**Billed vs effective cost.** **Billed** is what you were invoiced, upfront purchases and all.
**Effective** spreads those purchases across the period they cover. See
[effective cost vs billed cost](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/effective-vs-billed-cost/).

**Cost group vs cost center.** A **cost group** is CloudMonitor's unit of allocation — the thing
spend is assigned to. A **cost center** is an optional finance code you can attach to a cost group so
it lines up with your accounting system. Groups roll up by cost center where one is set.

:::note[Two spellings, on purpose]
You'll see **Cost center** on the cost group form and **Cost centre** as one of the three views on
your profile page. They are different things that happen to share a name, and these docs spell each
one the way your screen does.
:::

## A to Z

**Admin** — a workspace-level role with full run of CloudMonitor. See
[Roles and access](/docs/reference/roles-and-permissions/).

**Alert threshold** — a percentage of a budget that triggers a notification. Two kinds: **Actual**
fires on spend already incurred, **Forecasted** fires on the projected run rate. Thresholds never cap
spending; they tell you, they don't stop you.

**Allocation** — assigning each charge to the part of the business responsible for it. The point of
most of CloudMonitor.

**Anomaly** — an unusual change in spend that CloudMonitor detected, with a likely cause and an
owner. You triage it; you never mark it complete — CloudMonitor closes it once spend returns to
normal.

**Billed cost** — exactly what the provider invoiced for the period, including one-off purchases,
upfront fees and refunds. Reconciles to your invoice.

**Budget** — a spending target for a scope (the whole organization or one cost group) over a period,
with alert thresholds. Alert-only: a budget never blocks spending.

**Chargeback** — billing internal teams for the cloud they used. **Showback** is the same numbers
without the invoice — showing teams what they cost without moving money. Both need allocation to work.

**Commitment** — an agreement to use a certain amount over a term, in exchange for a lower rate.
Reservations and savings plans are the two kinds.

**Commitment discount** — the saving a commitment earns you against on-demand pricing.

**Cost basis** — whether you're looking at billed or effective cost. Your own setting, on
[your profile page](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/profile-and-preferences/).

**Cost center** — an optional finance code on a cost group, for lining up with your accounting
system.

**Cost group** — a slice of your spend that maps to something in your business: a team, a product, an
environment. The unit almost everything else reports against.

**Cost group code** — a short code on a cost group. A rule can route a charge by finding that code
inside a resource or reservation name, which is how naming conventions become allocation.

**Coverage** — how much of your eligible usage a commitment actually covers. Low coverage means
you're paying on-demand rates for things a commitment could have discounted.

**Effective cost** — upfront and commitment fees spread across the period they cover, so spend
follows usage. The default, and the right basis for comparing teams or months.

**FinOps** — the practice of managing cloud spend as a shared responsibility between finance,
engineering and the business. CloudMonitor's three menu groups — Inform, Optimize, Operate — follow
its phases.

**Forecast** — a projection of where spend lands by the end of the current period, based on the run
rate so far.

**Idle / orphaned** — resources still being billed that nothing is using. Orphaned usually means
something they were attached to was deleted and they weren't.

**Organization Owner** — whoever first set up your workspace. An admin who can't be demoted or
archived, so the workspace can never be locked out of its own administration.

**Pending** — the marker on a cost group created since the last update. Selectable immediately;
contributes no spend to reports until CloudMonitor next works out what belongs to it.

**Period** — the date range every cost figure is measured over. Global: set once, applies everywhere.

**Provider** — the cloud or vendor a charge came from.

**Requires repair** — the marker on a budget stored in a different currency from your workspace's
reporting currency. CloudMonitor never converts currencies, so the amount has to be re-entered.

**Reservation** — a commitment to a specific resource type for a term, at a reduced rate.

**Resource** — one billable thing in the cloud: a virtual machine, a database, a storage account.

**Resource group** — a container that resources live in. Often maps to a project or environment,
which is why it's a common thing to allocate by.

**Rightsizing** — moving a resource to a smaller size that still meets its workload.

**Savings plan** — a commitment to a level of spend per hour for a term, in exchange for lower rates.
More flexible than a reservation, usually a slightly smaller discount.

**Saved view** — an arrangement of a report — grouping, sorting, filters, columns — kept so you don't
rebuild it. Per-report and per-person.

**Showback** — see **Chargeback**.

**Subscription** — a billing container in Azure. Most organizations have several, often split by
environment or business unit.

**Tag** — a label attached to a cloud resource. Tagging is how spend gets attributed, which is why
gaps in it show up as **Unallocated**.

**Unallocated** — spend that no allocation rule matched, so it belongs to no cost group. Every
workspace has a built-in Unallocated group as the catch-all; it can be renamed but never deleted,
because every charge has to land somewhere.

**Unit economics** — cost expressed as a rate — per customer, per active user, per thousand requests
— so spend reads against the value it produces.

**Utilization** — how much of a commitment you actually used. Unused commitment is money already
spent for nothing.

**Virtual tag** — a mapping of several source tag names onto one reporting name, so `env`, `Env` and
`environment` all report as one thing. Renames; never moves spend between cost groups.

**WAF / Well-Architected** — Microsoft's framework for reliability, security, operational excellence
and performance. CloudMonitor surfaces findings against it; the cost pillar lives under Savings &
Waste instead.

**Waste** — spend with no corresponding value: idle resources, oversized ones, forgotten storage.