How costs are attributed
Cost Center integrates with Kubecost, which integrates in turn with the major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and GCP among them. Every hour it ingests your provider’s billing data, and reconciles the CPU, GPU, and RAM discounts you negotiated against what you were actually billed. Its allocation engine then maps each hour of spend onto Domino entities: users, Projects, organizations, billing tags, workloads, and workload types. Compute and storage spend resolves to an entity this way. Spend that maps to neither, such as shared infrastructure, appears as Cloud Services: it counts toward the total, but it drops out of the charts and summaries as soon as you apply a filter, because there is no entity to attribute it to. Cost calculation methodology gives the exact formulas, including how provider discounts and credits are applied.Cost data is retained for up to 1 year. The most recent 36 to 48 hours may be incomplete, because cloud providers report with a delay. Domino reconciles it once the full billing detail arrives.
Where cost data appears
Start with the Cost Center dashboard, at Govern > Cost center. Move to the API when you need the numbers in another system.
The Cost API aggregates by the labels of Domino domain objects, not by arbitrary Kubernetes objects such as clusters. Its
/allocation and /asset paths are restricted to CloudAdmins, and Domino recommends calling it with a Service Account.
Control spend
Attribution tells you where the money went. Billing tags, budgets, and alerts are what stop it going there again, once cloud billing is connected.1
Connect cloud billing
Cost Center is preconfigured for AWS. On other providers, provision the cost usage report yourself and ask your Domino representative to set up Cost Center Cloud Billing Integration. Configuration options for Cost Center also covers retaining cost data in blob storage for long-term analysis.
2
Define billing tags
Billing tags group Projects for accounting purposes, and a Project can carry several, so you can track cost along a dimension the Project and organization hierarchy doesn’t capture. Under Admin > Manage resources > Cost tracking > Billing tags, set the billing tag requirement for new Projects to
Disabled, Optional, or Required, then create the tag names. See Configure Billing Tags, Budgets, and Alerts.3
Set budgets
Projects and organizations start with no budget limit. Under Admin > Manage resources > Cost tracking > Budget & alerts, set a default monthly limit, measured by calendar month, that applies to organizations, Projects, and billing tags, then use budget overrides for the ones that need a different figure.
4
Turn on alerts
Alerts are off by default, so a budget on its own notifies nobody. Under Alert settings, select Alert on 75% and 100% of budget thresholds, and configure email under Platform settings > Email. Domino then sends a notification daily once a budget reaches 75%, and sends billing tag alerts by email only.
Changing the billing tag requirement doesn’t affect existing Projects. They stay untagged until someone applies tags by hand, which is why the requirement is worth settling before a deployment fills up with Projects.
Related
Governance
Policies, evidence, approvals, and gates: the Governance Center facet that defines what compliance means and blocks actions until it is met.
Audit Trail
The record of user activity across the deployment, for compliance verification, security investigations, and audit reporting.
Set limits on Dataset usage
Cap the storage Datasets consume, and let individual Projects opt out of the limits.