Using tags for Cost Analysis
You can use tags in IBM Cloud to organize your resources and track resource costs. When you use tags in the “key:value” format, IBM’s Cost Analysis GUI and exported CSVs allows you to group and filter cloud costs by the values.
For example, I made up a tag key named “my-orgs” and tagged two VSIs (LPARs) and their attached volumes with “my-orgs:organization1” and a third VSI with “my-orgs:organization2”.
After waiting a day for the tags to take effect in the billing I am able to group my costs by organization to see how much each of my organizations is costing:
I can also use “my-orgs” as a cost filter and filter just the costs for one org:
If I want to see more billing data I can export the instance usage as a CSV. The key “my-orgs” becomes a column in the spreadsheet. I can then filter on that column and use a formula to find each organization’s costs. I could then use this spreadsheet as the basis for internal charge-back invoices to my organization:
Easily tagging PowerVS VSIs and attached volumes
Tagging PowerVS VSIs and their attached volumes can be onerous and error prone in the cloud console. I have created a script that will tag a VSI and all its attached volumes using a single command. The script is included in my PowerVS tools github repository with other PowerVS related scripts.
The command usage is:
tagLPARandVolumes.sh -h
Syntax: $ tagLPARandVolumes.sh [-h] [-w WORKSPACE_NAME] [-i INSTANCE_NAME] [-t TAGS] [-d]
Add tags to LPAR/instance and all of its attached volumes.
h print help
w the PowerVS workspace name
i instance / LPAR name or ID
t a comma separated list of tags
d detach the tags. The default is to attach the tags.
A sample call of the script to add the “my-orgs:organization3” tag to a VSI named “mylpar” in PowerVS workspace “theworkspace” looks like this:
tagLPARandVolumes.sh -w theworkspace -i mylpar -t "my-orgs:organization3"
Using the tagLPARandVolumes.sh script you can quickly and easily tag PowerVS VSIs and volumes and correlate their cloud costs using IBM Cloud Cost Analysis or spreadsheets for custom reporting.