# Showback and Cost Attribution: EBS > Showback and Cost Attribution applied to EBS in non-production. ZopNight Attribute EBS on AWS, GCP, and Azure, read-only, production excluded by default. Source: https://zop.dev/solutions/aws-ebs/showback Published: 2026-07-01 · Author: avinash-gaurav · Tags: zopnight, aws, storage, showback --- Team and tag attribution on a unified cost_allocation_daily table. Equal split for shared resources via shareCount. Tags from cloud (AWS tags, GCP labels, Azure tags) and accepted smart tags. Sankey cost flow on Reports for click-to-drill breakdowns. Applied to AWS EBS, it is one of the most reliable ways to take waste out of non-production without touching how the service runs in production. Elastic Block Store volumes bill around the clock, and showback and cost attribution is about making sure you only pay for the hours and capacity you actually use. ZopNight Attribute this against your measured usage, the same [FinOps](https://zop.dev/learn/finops) discipline that separates it from dashboard-first tools like [CloudHealth](https://zop.dev/compare/cloudhealth-vs-zopnight). ## Why showback and cost attribution matters for EBS What showback and cost attribution actually buys you: - Team and tag dimensions on the same data model. - Sankey cost flow with savings overlay and recommendation deep-links. - Pagination, batched values, and batched trends across tag keys. - Live data from cost_records, sub-second GROUP BY over 30-90 day windows. For EBS specifically, the win comes from the gap between how long the resource runs and how little of that time anyone is using it. ## How ZopNight does it Connect a read-only role, let ZopNight discover your EBS across regions and accounts, and act, scheduling stops and starts on your hours, guided rightsizing for the oversized, idle detection for the forgotten. It ships 490 built-in audit rules across AWS (216), GCP (127), and Azure (147) and 124 of those recommendations are wired to act end to end, 28 one-click and 96 guided. Production is excluded by default and every action is logged. ## How ZopNight schedules EBS The loop that does this is deliberately mechanical, and it starts read-only. You connect AWS, GCP, and Azure with a read-only role, and ZopNight discovers every EBS across your regions and accounts. It records a per-action permission verdict for each one, so you can see where it can list a resource but not yet stop it, and you review that inventory, filter it by status or type, and search for the specific resources you care about before anything is scheduled. Scheduling itself is a cron you write once in plain terms, stop at 7 PM, start at 8 AM on weekdays, pinned to your timezone so the jobs fire at local business hours rather than UTC. A weekly 24-hour grid shows the schedule visually so you catch gaps and overlaps before you save, and an estimate of active versus inactive hours appears before you commit. Resources attach individually or bundle into groups like "dev-cluster" or "staging-db" so a whole environment follows one cadence. Actions run in dependency order, so a database comes up before the app server that depends on it. When something needs to stay up, an override forces a EBS ON or OFF for a defined window, carries a reason so teammates understand why it exists, and expires automatically so nothing is left running by accident. If a start or stop fails, ZopNight retries up to three times and falls back to a dead-letter queue rather than silently dropping the action, and every state change lands in an audit trail that records whether a schedule, an override, or a specific user triggered it. ## Getting started Getting started is intentionally low-stakes: - Connect AWS, GCP, and Azure with a read-only role. Nothing is scheduled or changed at this stage. - Let ZopNight discover your EBS and review exactly what it found, filtered by account, region, and status. - Create a schedule in your timezone and attach the non-production resources or groups you want it to cover. - Watch the first cycle run, with Slack, Teams, or Google Chat notifications on every start, stop, and failure, then layer in idle cleanup and guided rightsizing. Production stays excluded by default throughout, and because discovery and recommendations are read-only, you can prove the value before you enable a single action. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does showback and cost attribution on EBS risk production? No. Production is excluded by default; ZopNight acts only on the non-production EBS resources you choose. ### How fast does it work? Scheduling usually shows results in the first cycle. Connect read-only and enable a schedule; there is no migration and no agent to install.