Glossary
CloudCheckr's reporting tools allow you to analyze your cost and usage data—so you can figure out exactly where your money is going.
To learn more, click a text box to review the cost report terminology associated with each cloud provider and CloudCheckr.
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Term |
Definition |
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Availability Zone |
A combination of the region and zone where an instance exists, or a usage charge occurs (EX: us-east-1a). |
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Blended Cost |
AWS calculates blended cost by multiplying the blended rate by the usage amount. AWS displays the Blended cost as blank for any line items that have a Line Item Type of discount. To calculate discounts, AWS only uses the Unblended cost of a linked account aggregated by the linked account and SKU. |
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Description |
Details about the type of usage for a selected line item. The description matches the Line Item Description column from the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and includes the average price of any usage that is based on a volume pricing tier. |
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EC2 Instance ID |
The unique identifier used by the vendor to distinguish the actual assets associated with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. (EX: This ID, i-09c05fc4c8d310df5, is for a m5.xlarge EC2 instance.) |
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List Cost |
The calculated cost of usage without reservations or discounts. |
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Month |
The calendar month provided in abbreviated name and 4-digit year format (EX: Dec 2019, Jan 2020) |
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Operation |
Indicates the specific action performed on an asset. For example, a network transfers data (operation) in or out of a compute instance (the asset). Paired with resource, this attribute helps customers understand the source and actions that contribute to cost. (EX: CPU, N1Standard, or Dataproc) |
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Region |
The geopgraphical location where an instance exists or a where a usage charge occurred (EX: US East or Europe-west1). |
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Resource ID |
A unique identifier used by the vendor to identify the assets that are used. (EX: instance ID of a virtual machine (VM), the name of a storage bucket, or an ID of the data volume. |
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Service |
The cloud products that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides. |
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Unblended Cost |
This cost metric reflects the cost of the usage, and is provided as the default option for analyzing costs in AWS. Unblended cost reflects cost after discounts and separates discounts into their own line items. You can use Unblended cost to reconcile cost with AWS invoices. |
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Usage Quantity |
The generic usage quantity with units that vary by resources |
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Usage Type |
Specifies operational details of the usage line item. The following example describes Amazon EC2 High-Memory Double ExtraLarge Instance box usage in the US West (Oregon) region: USW1-BoxUsage:m2.2xlarge. |
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Tenancy |
The ability to share common access with specific privileges to a software instance. AWS offers Dedicated and Shared (Default) tenancy. |
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Offering Class |
A type of reserved instance. AWS offers Standard or Convertible. |
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Scope |
The capacity or range of an instance. In AWS, instances can be regional or zonal, which means scoped by Availability Zone or AZ-scoped. |
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Instance Count |
The physical number of purchased instances. |
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Instance Used |
The normalization factor that the instance has physically used for the given time period. |
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Instance Footprint |
The normalization factor of the described instance. For more information, review the Reserved Instances and EC2 Instance Size Flexibility topic. |
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Term |
Definition |
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Application ID |
A GUID that uniquely identifies the app's registration in your Active Directory tenant. Also referred to as the Client ID. |
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Assessment ID |
The unique identifier of an assessment object in the assessment table. When you build reports in Azure, it creates a new assessment. The Assessment ID ties the report data together for a single point in time when you ran the report job. Displayed in the user interface (UI) as AssessmentId. |
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Authorization Token |
Also referred to as the Authorization code, the authorization token is returned during the CPV consent handshake. This token is useful for generating an authentication code silently. |
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Billing Customer |
Azure customer with billing data and subscriptions ← Please verify |
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Billing Family ID |
The unique identifier associated with a billing family. The billing family is CloudCheckr's method for grouping smaller structures within the cloud provider. For Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) projects, the billing family is a group of subscriptions. Displayed in the user interface (UI) as BillingFamilyId. |
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Billing ID |
The unique identifier applied to a subscription's billing data after it switches to a new payer. Previously, this ID was indistinguishable from a Subscription ID. You will only find the Billing ID in billing data; resource-related information will still use the Subscription ID. Displayed in the user interface (UI) as BillingId. |
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Billing System ID |
The unique identifier for a CSP customer provided by Azure. Displayed in the user interface (UI) as BillingSystemId. |
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Client ID |
A unique identifier that describes the app's registration in your Active Directory tenant. Also referred to as the Application ID. Displayed in the user interface (UI) as ClientId. |
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Consumed Service |
A service that uses the Resource ID to extract usage and not the Meter information. For example, a resource may be considered an Application Gateway, BUT it falls under a Virtual Network that consumed it. Consumed Services is a very high-level metric that Azure uses to provide a generic grouping of Meter Categories |
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Cost |
Standard Cost, which is how much the line item cost the payer of the account. This is how much Microsoft has charged for some usage. |
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Classic CSP |
Cloud Solutions Provider. An account type within Microsoft for MSPs and Resellers that allows for the selling to, and management of multiple customers. Each customer within the CSP can have multiple subscriptions. CSPs are giving a discount off Azure MSRP rates. Office 365 costs are processed through CSPs. |
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Enterprise Agreement (EA) & Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) |
An account type within Microsoft geared toward enterprises made up of multiple subscriptions with no support for customers. The EA is a contractual agreement with Microsoft that can provide discounted pricing off of Azure MSPR rates. |
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Azure Plan / New Customer Experience (NCE) |
A single agreement that all customers will sign digitally with simplified terms and conditions. The agreement lets customers make purchases across all Azure channels and allows them to add products and services as needed. |
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List Cost |
The Retail cost from the provider plus or minus any custom markup or discounts that the CSP added to their billing configuration. The custom cost that is recalculated by CloudCheckr. If the Configure Custom Cost option is enabled, then List cost will recalculate the cost to Pay-As-You-Go pricing. It will also include any custom charges or custom usage rates that are applied. |
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Meter Category |
The name of the classification category for the meter. For example, Cloud services and Networking. |
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Meter Name |
The name of the meter. Meter Subcategories are divided into Meter Names. |
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Meter Region |
The Azure region in which a service exists. |
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Meter Sub Category |
Name of the meter subclassification category. |
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Pay-As-You-Go |
A single month-to-month subscription where a customer will pay MSRP rates to run Azure resources. |
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Resource Group |
Logical collections of virtual machines, storage accounts, virtual networks, web apps, databases, and/or database servers. Typically, users will group related resources for an application, divided into groups for production and non-production—but you can subdivide further as needed. |
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Retail Cost |
Although this is not used often, the purpose of Retail cost is to show how much a line item would cost if it were charged at a standard On-Demand rate (AKA "Pay As You Go"). This is useful for CSPs & EAs because they get discounted rates for their usage. Think of this as what a Payer Account Manager would want to show their boss because it provides good contrast with the discounted rate they are paying for their service. Retail cost is the recalculated cost of the services based on what the subscription would pay if they were a Pay-As-You-Go account with no agreement with Microsoft. |
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Standard Cost |
The cost that the owner of the EA/CSP pays to Microsoft written to the Azure Usage Report. Standard cost corresponds to the amount that Microsoft sends as an invoice to the customer. |
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Subscription |
The type of billing commitment between a customer and Microsoft. |
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Tenant ID / Directory ID |
A unique identifier assigned to each Entra / Active Directory tenant. |
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Usage Report Item |
A processed item taken from usage data or a completed invoice. A Usage Report item has three types of costs associated with it: Cost, List cost, and Retail cost. |
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Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider |
The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program that enables partners to directly manage their entire Microsoft cloud customer lifecycle. Partners in this program use dedicated in-product tools to directly provision, manage, and support their customer subscriptions. |
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Term |
Definition |
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Account |
AWS: The name associated with an AWS linked account. Used for cost analytics of consolidated billing accounts. The 12-digit AWS number used to identify a linked account. Used for cost analytics of consolidated billing accounts. The account can be the master payer or the linked account. Azure: The name associated with an Azure subscription. The subscription GUID is used to identify the subscription. The subscription will automatically populate cost data from the master payer (EA/MCA/CSP). |
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Cloud Vendor |
The company that provides the cloud services. (Ex: AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud) |
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Credentials |
AWS: The required authorization details that enables CloudCheckr to connect to and scan cloud account(s). For AWS, the credentials consist of the Secret Key, and Access Key. Azure: Azure has a number of different credentials: Enterprise Agreements and Microsoft Customer Accounts, customers will initiate consent using OAuth 2.0 for CloudCheckr to receive cost data. Subscriptions and Active Directory (Microsoft 365) will use an App Registration and Secret Key to retrieve inventory data. |
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Dashboard |
Displays high-level statistics based on the most recent snapshot for the current project. |
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Project Code |
A user-defined number that represents an internal tracking number, project name, or chargeback code, which you can configure in the Account Families or Subscription features. |
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Projects |
The landing page that displays each time you log in to CloudCheckr. The Projects page will provide links to your projects, let you know the last time a snapshot was taken of each project, and list the daily and monthly bill for each project—as long as billing monitoring is enabled. A project is where you can take snapshots and view reports on a specific cloud account. If you have multiple accounts, you will set up a separate project for each account. |
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Reports |
The feature that displays the results of your assessments. There are three types of reports:
Some services will have unique reports, such as a report for Idle EC2 instances. |
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Reserved Instance |
Is your resource a reserved instance? True or False? |
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Snapback |
The feature that allows CloudCheckr to retrieve all available information based on a project’s credentials and produces reports based on its findings. This is a point-in-time report. |
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Week |
The numeric calendar week when the charges were incurred. The format is MM DD YYYY - MM DD YYYY. |
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Parent |
Payer account |
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Child |
The account linked to the Parent account; also known as the Payee account. |
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Base Cost |
Base cost is Blended or Unblended cost depending on how the customer chooses to configure the billing collector. |
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List Cost |
List cost is the customized, modified cost generated by CloudCheckr. |
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Price |
Calculated list cost |
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Cost |
Calculated unblended/standard cost |
