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 Account Groups & Business Mappings

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Kevin King's profile image
Kevin King posted Wed October 05, 2022 09:36 AM
Hello Community,

What are your thoughts about using Account Groups & Business Mappings in parallel, is there a good use case for managing the two?

Today we use Account Groups to categorize our AWS accounts, capture additional meta data for the account, and tie these into our Views.

I'd like to explore Business Mappings more to see how we can leverage them to increase value to our customers. One possible use case for Business Mappings that has recently surfaced is to try and allocate AWS support costs. 

  • Have any members made extensive use of Business Mappings and have examples they would not mind sharing?
  • Any environments using Business Mappings instead of Account Groups and if so, what was the logic for opting to use BMs over AGs?

Regards,
Kevin
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Andrew Midgley's profile image
Andrew Midgley posted Wed October 12, 2022 07:00 AM  Best Answer
Great question @Kevin King.  As Jeff mentioned there are good reasons to use both together, and in fact we see many customers do that.

​​Use Account Groups whenever you simply need to categorise AWS accounts/Azure subscriptions/GCP projects. This makes sense where the account is entirely owned by a particular team, is one type of environment (such as production) or belongs to a single business unit.

Business Mapping is far more flexible and serves a much broader set of use cases. It can leverage any of the reporting dimensions within Cloudability and apply complex logic and pattern matching (including regular expressions) to group billing data.  Some example use cases we see:
  • Applying logic across multiple billing attributes in order to allocate costs - this commonly involves tags, accounts and account groups.
  • Mapping IDs to human readable information. These IDs are often present in resource tags.
  • Representing business hierarchy, with business mappings referring to other other business mappings.  For example, delivery teams could be mapped to departments which are then mapped to business units.
  • Classifying usage as compliant or not compliant due to missing/invalid tags or the instance type being used.
  • Categorising spend as COGS v Opex
  • Any other ways that spend needs to be categorised that isn't directly captured by one tag or through accounts/account groups.

And as Jeff also noted, both Account Groups and Business Mappings can be used with Views, which are effectively global filters that can be toggled as needed.
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Jeff Hyatt's profile image
Jeff Hyatt posted Wed October 05, 2022 10:32 AM
Hi Kevin,

We use both, and don't see it as an "either/or" situation as they provide for different use cases. 

I think of Views as "global filters" for your reports and dashboards. Great for using them as you are for grouping accounts or other aspects of your environment. And of course they can provide for restricted views of your environment by limiting users to specific views.

Business Mappings are "custom dimensions" (or columns) for your reports. For instance, we use them to map product owners and business unit and other data to AWS tags to be able to split/compare/allocate costs by product owner or other groupings. No limit to the ways you can carve up costs and usage in the reports via custom Business Mappings. 

And don't forget Account Groups - they're like tags for your accounts, and great for providing different dimensions to your accounts within your reports (cost center, bu, account owner, etc.).

Views act outside your reports and dashboards as global filters restricting the data available to them. Business Mappings (and Account Groups) provide custom dimensions for slicing up data within your reports and dashboard widgets. 

Best,

Jeff
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