Analyzing your environment costs with Cloudera Observability

The Cloudera Observability Financial Governance Chargeback feature collects CPU, memory, and resource usage data from your environment, allocates those charges to your custom cost centers, and visually displays the results. It provides an in-depth visibility into the workload resource costs of your environment’s infrastructure that can be used for planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

About the Cloudera Observability Chargeback feature

The Cloudera Observability Financial Governance Chargeback feature measures and records the costs of your workload resources and allocates them to the users who consume them. For resources that are shared, such as multi-tenant clusters that are shared between different organizations and departments, it also enables you to measure and record those shared costs and charge those users based on their actual consumption. This feature helps you plan and forecast budgets, it helps you ensure that costs are in line with business requirements and the Chargeback cost center reports can be used to raise cost awareness and set limits to control your overall costs.

About cost centers and their criteria

The Cloudera Observability Financial Governance Chargeback feature calculates cost based on the following criteria:
  • User or Pool usage, which enables you to separate user and resource pool costs.
  • CPU and Memory hourly unit costs, which are based on actual CPU and memory usage using your internal pricing or cost model.

Using the Chargeback criteria that you have set, charges for CPU and memory consumption are calculated and assigned by Cloudera Observability to a cost center that is created by you. Cost centers separate costs across users or pools and track their workload resource consumption costs. They can be divided and/or grouped into members associated with an organization or group for helping you assign the charges to a user’s department.

When you create a Cloudera Observability cost center, detailed summary reports of the costs and resource usage for the environment are generated. After a job has run, the tracked resource costs that is associated with the cost center’s environment, service, or cluster are visually displayed. You can drill down for more detailed reports, such as viewing the costs incurred by a specific user or pool or viewing the top 5 users or pools whose jobs created the highest costs or the top 25 jobs or queries that created the highest costs.

Overtime, as more jobs and queries are run you can view and compare historical trends by selecting specific time periods from the time-range list. By default, data is retained for 6 months.

The Cloudera Observability Chargeback feature uses usage-based metrics for CPU utilization and memory consumption that have an hourly aggregation.

The Chargeback costs are calculated based on an hourly cost per resource unit, where:

  • The CPU costs are expressed as the amount of time a job process uses CPU within an hour.
  • The Memory costs are expressed as an hourly allocation cost per gigabyte.

Considerations and limitations

The following describes consideration and limitations you must know when using the Cloudera Observability Chargeback feature:
  • Cost centers aggregate the charges, where a cost center can be for one individual user, multiple users, or pools. To avoid cost duplication, users and pools must only be assigned one cost center.

  • When viewing the Chargeback reports, the costs are adjusted to a user's local timezone. Therefore, total costs, such as daily charges, may differ across timezones.

Assumptions and prerequisites

The Cloudera Observability Chargeback feature assumes the following:
  • Your organization has an internal pricing or cost model.
  • You have created Cloudera Observability users or resource pools and assigned them to your workloads.