Given the different cloud providers - how are streamlining your tagging strategy?  Thinking as long as we have the App ID in there, we should be good, but I may also be naive in thinking that.  Looking forward to your thoughts/feedback!

Hey, Jenny!

It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish with your cost model. For us, our main focus right now is on achieving true application TCO, so we're concentrated on getting those application ID tags into our cloud data. The syntax is a bit different between Azure and AWS (AWS tags come in as separate columns in the data while Azure tags are all combined into a single JSON-formatted column), but a few formulas in your transform pipeline can work that out easily enough.

As far as actually getting the tags in the data, we essentially had to bribe and cajole our cloud teams to cooperate. We finally got them to agree that every time they work on an account in AWS or Azure, they make sure the necessary tags are populated. This means our top applications/accounts are tagged right away, but it also means some accounts/applications will take a very long time to be tagged—or will never be tagged. From a cost perspective, however, those accounts that drive the most spend are the ones we work on frequently. So, that's not a huge issue.

Once the data starts flowing in with tags, we just appended the appropriate tables to the cloud master table, and voila! We have cloud costs broken out for the application layer.

While we aren't taking advantage of the Cloud Capabilities yet we did spend time last year thinking through and implementing our tagging strategy.  Right now we use the following:  Application ID, Cost Center that is responsible for the activity, and environment (prod, test, dev, etc.).  We're also considering adding an identifier generated by the Cloud Governance team.  

Even though we aren't doing much with it, we did enable our connectors to AWS and Azure so that we could monitor tagging coverage.  

Thanks, y'all!!  Our Cloud Governance team is starting to put their heads together for a 'unified strategy' across all the various cloud providers and they included us (woohoo!).  We asked them to definitely put App ID in there so we could send specific costs up to the apps.  I need to see, too, if they have any pull w/the teams that are setting up the on-prem infrastructure - would be good to isolate those costs as well.

Reading my mind on that one.  In my simple mind why couldn't our on prem teams provide cloud like billing details ?  Think of the possibilities...

You might also want to look at a project ID, environment (dev, stg, prod), org responsible, and cost center (although my worry is how do we control the non-finance teams with putting in a wrong one).  I'm sure you could expand them even further depending on the needs of your org.  I want to say our cloud org has about 15 different tags defined based on their needs.  They are in the process of entering them into AWS and Azure currently, while I continually bug them on when they'll be in .

There's an article showing Apptio's recommended tags which are included in our tagging framework.

https://tbmcouncil.jiveon.com/docs/DOC-6293

Our Enterprise Platforms team are in the process of setting up the tagging programme to ensure everyone is using a standard model. The MVP for this programme is to ensure an App ID is included, further to that we have requested environment, owner and cost centre.

The tagging quality isn't actually too bad it's the number of accounts which is the issue - 118 linked accounts just with AWS!!! 

Just met with our cloud taggers this morning.  They will definitely be adding App ID (thank goodness!).  Next will be reaching out to the other providers to get the raw data.  One lady pulls down the detail from Azure already.  I also need to get up to speed on the API deets - can't use that without DL (Datalink) right?  We don't even have our cloud component installed yet.  Been spending all this time wrangling about to get tagging in order ha.  Prior to all this, we were just sending SaaS costs directly to the app via an allocation line and UMT, but that's easy for say Salesforce, ServiceNow, Apptio, Workday, etc.  This is more of a IaaS/PaaS situation..    New territory means new learnings, tho!

While we still haven't enabled the Cloud Component we did enable our connectors to AWS and Azure several months ago (in Datalink) and let them run weekly.  It's a helpful way to monitor our progress on tagging completeness.  Once we get a "spare" moment hopefully we can get the full Cloud Capabilities up and running.

You have a sister in misery re that "spare" moment.. ;-p

The Datalink connectors are the way forward - we have security clearance but not a/c holder acceptance (holds head in hands!!)

Would recommend get Datalink set up even without the component installed - just create a temporary connector, although don't do all of them as you'll need to recreate them if you need to change any of the details.

Can't wait to get our connectors pulling the data out - it's taking me a number of hours to manually pull the data and then map them all, sure there will be some mistakes also.