Showback (cost attribution)
Attribute spend to teams and to cloud tags (including accepted Smart Tags), drill into each one, and track cost per business unit with unit economics.
Showback answers “whose cost is this?” by team, by tag, or both, so every team can see and own its spend. Every report on this page reads from a single attribution table built from your cost records and refreshed whenever billing sync runs, so the Teams and Tags tabs always agree with each other.
Costs → Reports → Teams: attribution coverage, per-team cost over time, and the team cost attribution table.
Before you start
- Teams with resource assignments, for team attribution. Manage them under Governance → Teams.
- Tags on your resources, for tag attribution: native cloud tags or labels, or Smart Tags values you have accepted.
- Billing sync, for billed figures. The attribution table is refreshed whenever billing sync runs. See Reports overview for the two cost sources.
How it works
You can attribute the same cost record by both team and tag simultaneously; the two dimensions are independent.
| Dimension | What it does | Splitting |
|---|---|---|
| Team | Cost flows to the team(s) that own the resource | Cost is split equally across owning teams when a resource has more than one. Unattributed resources are tracked separately. |
| Tag | Cost flows to each tag key-value pair on the resource | Each tag key-value pair gets the full resource cost: no splitting. A resource tagged env=prod and team=alpha contributes its full cost to both. |
Showback covers attributed spend only: on an organisation with billing connected, the Reports headline also includes billing lines that match no resource, so it can sit above the showback totals by that unattributed remainder.
If you sum tag totals across all keys, you get more than your total spend (a single resource is counted under multiple tags). Sum team totals plus the unattributed bucket and you get the attributed spend; on a rack-rate organisation that matches the cost trend, and with billing connected, the trend is higher by the unattributed remainder.
Team attribution
The Teams tab on the Reports page lists every team with its cost for the selected period, sorted by spend.
Click a team to drill in:
- By provider: AWS / GCP / Azure split
- By resource type: top resource types in the team’s spend
- Trend chart: cost over time for the team, with the same granularity controls as the org-wide trend
- Resources: paginated list of resources attributed to this team
How teams get attributed to resources
Team ownership is resolved per resource via the org’s team / resource bindings. Resources owned by more than one team have their daily cost split equally across the owning teams. Resources with no owning team are tracked separately and surface under Unattributed teams on the Sankey overlay and in the team list.
Tag attribution
The Tags tab is the same shape as Teams but keyed on tag key-value pairs. Each row is a flattened key:value, such as env:prod, team:alpha, or cost-center:engineering.
Costs → Reports → Tags: tag coverage, the top tag pairs, cost over time per tag pair, and each pair’s spend against the previous period.
What gets included
Four sources of tags feed the attribution:
| Source | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| AWS tags | Native EC2/RDS/S3/etc. tags |
| GCP labels | Native Compute Engine / GKE labels |
| Azure tags | Native VM / Storage / SQL tags |
| Smart Tags | ZopNight’s policy-derived virtual tags you’ve explicitly accepted. Pending (not-yet-accepted) values are not included. Smart Tags stay inside ZopNight unless you use Apply to cloud to write a value onto the resource. |
Each tag pair records where it came from: cloud (a native tag), auto (an accepted Smart Tag), inherited, or mixed when a pair spans more than one source. See Smart Tags.
Drilling in
Click any tag row to expand:
- All values for that tag key (e.g. expand
env:to seeenv:prod,env:staging,env:dev) - Provider split for that key-value
- Resource-type split for that key-value
- Trend chart for the key-value with provider / type filter dropdowns
Tag trend (batched)
To compare multiple tag values on the same chart (e.g. env:prod vs env:staging vs env:dev), the trend endpoint accepts multiple tagKey / tagValue pairs in a single call. The chart renders one line per pair.
Improve tag coverage
The Tag Coverage bar at the top of the Tags tab shows how much of the period’s spend is attributed to at least one tag. A low percentage means your attribution is missing context. Two ways to improve it:
- Tag the resources at the cloud level (Terraform, AWS Resource Tagger, etc.).
- Define a Smart Tag policy in Governance → Policies → Tagging to derive a consistent virtual tag for untagged resources, then accept the derived values so they count toward attribution. See Smart Tags.
Unit economics
For costs in business terms (cost per active user, cost per order, cost per 1,000 API requests), define a unit metric and push (or let ZopNight pull) the denominator values.
Define the unit metric
Go to Costs → Unit Economics and create a new metric. Set the name (e.g. “Monthly active users”), label, display scale (1 / 100 / 1000), and the source:
push,csv, orpull.Pick the ingest path
- Push API:
POST /orgs/{orgID}/unit-metric-values/{id}: your pipeline POSTs[{date, value}]daily. - CSV upload: drag a CSV onto the metric (capped at 1 MB / 5,000 rows).
- Pull: register an HTTPS endpoint + auth + interval. ZopNight fetches it daily at 21:10 UTC, with SSRF guards (no private IPs, no localhost, no link-local, 30s timeout).
- Push API:
View cost per unit on the Reports trend
The trend chart gains a secondary axis showing infra spend per unit (cost ÷ denominator) for each bucket. Zero-denominator buckets are skipped. A server-side average-of-last-N forecast appears when there are enough data points.
Curated catalogue
Five common metric types are pre-defined: MAU, DAU, API requests, transactions, and signups. Add any of these in one click and configure the ingest path afterwards.
Test fetch (for pull metrics)
The Test fetch button runs the full pull code path synchronously before the cron schedule starts. Use this to verify your endpoint, auth header, and JSON shape before scheduling the cron. This saves you a 24-hour feedback loop.
Dimensioned unit economics
If the cost numerator is dimensioned (team or tag), the denominator falls back to the org-wide metric series when no dimensioned values exist. So you can ask “cost per MAU for team alpha” without having to push per-team MAU values. Pushing them still gets you a more accurate denominator.
Endpoint paths
The showback endpoints live under /reports/* (not the older /showback/* paths). If you have integrations or saved URLs that use /showback/*, update them:
/reports/teams,/reports/teams/:teamId,/reports/teams/:teamId/resources,/reports/teams/trends/reports/tags,/reports/tags/:tagKey,/reports/tags/:tagKey/values/:tagValue/resources,/reports/tags/trends
Troubleshooting
Tag totals add up to more than my total spend
Expected. Each tag key-value pair gets the full resource cost, so a resource tagged env=prod and team=alpha is counted under both. Team totals plus the unattributed bucket give the attributed spend.
Showback totals are lower than the Reports headline
With billing connected, the Reports headline also includes billing lines that match no resource. Showback covers attributed spend only, so it sits below the headline by that unattributed remainder.
Smart Tag values are missing from the Tags tab
Only accepted Smart Tag values count. Pending (not-yet-accepted) values are not included; accept them in Smart Tags.
A pull unit metric has no values
Run Test fetch on the metric to exercise the full pull path against your endpoint, auth header, and JSON shape. Endpoints on private IPs, localhost, or link-local addresses are refused, and a fetch times out after 30 seconds.