Apptio recommended tagging approach for Public Cloud IaaS/PaaS services

Edit online

Tagging in a public cloud environment is a vital way to apply more informative information to your cloud resources. Without tagging information, cloud-provider bills will include information about the provider services and potentially the accounts responsible for deploying the resources only. By tagging information, you can get more descriptive information about the resources, such as the application consuming that resource, the environment supported by the resource, and the individual who owns the resource. All are examples of information that is generally associated with resource tags.

  • Applies to: Apptio Costing Standard or Apptio Cloud Cost Management running on TBM Studio v12.3.3 or later.
Apptio’s Costing Standard Cloud Service Provider object includes some pre-defined attributes that are likely candidates to be populated with tags. The list of those attributes are as follows:
  • Consumer
    Note: Depending on how enterprises are organized, Consumer, in many cases, can be populated by a non-tag attribute, such as a linked account for Amazon Web Services (AWS) or an account for Microsoft Azure.
  • Application
  • Environment
  • Purpose
  • Cost Center
  • System Owner
  • Project
Apptio recommends that enterprises configure tags to capture information associated with at least some of the attributes listed above using the means appropriate for the provider. Please discuss with your provider and cloud infrastructure owners for more information on configuring tags. The following links are associated with popular providers:

These attributes can then be used as dimensions within your analytics and/or as dimensions by which costs are allocated. The following image shows using the Application attribute as a pivotable value to examine your cloud costs by consuming application.Using Application attribute as a pivotal be value

Additionally, the Application attribute is often a means by which the costs should be allocated up to the appropriate application to drive an application TCO inclusive of public IaaS/PaaS spend.