Glossary of terms

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.