Cloud Cost Reporting: Trends, Breakdowns and Exports
One cost view across three clouds, built on the billing data your finance team already trusts.
Where the numbers come from
ZopNight keeps two cost figures for each resource. The rack rate is computed from provider pricing APIs and the time a resource spent running, so it is available the moment an account is connected. The billing cost comes from each cloud’s own billing source once billing sync is set up:
- AWS: Cost Explorer, or your Cost and Usage Report 2.0 export in S3 if you opt in. The export keeps resource-level detail for its whole history and brings in taxes, fees, credits and refunds.
- Azure: Cost Management, read as amortized cost. In Azure’s actual-cost data, usage covered by a reservation shows an effective price of zero; the amortized dataset spreads the reservation’s prorated cost onto the resources that used it, which is what a per-resource report needs.
- GCP: the BigQuery billing export, with credits folded in so committed-use, sustained-use and promotional discounts appear the way the invoice shows them.
Where a resource-day has a billing row, that row is used; where it does not, the rack rate fills in. Every report states which basis it is showing. Non-USD bills are converted with the exchange rate for each date.
Reconciling to the invoice
Some charges never map to a resource: data transfer, taxes, support fees, services ZopNight does not discover. For billing-connected organisations those are carried as unattributed spend and added to the headline totals, so the summary matches the invoice instead of quietly under-reporting. Breakdowns by team, tag or resource stay attribution-only by design.
The views
- Trends at hourly, daily, monthly or yearly intervals over the last 7, 30 or 90 days or a custom range, for the organisation, a resource group or one resource, with period-over-period change. A savings overlay plots reclaimable spend on the same chart.
- Provider and resource breakdowns: spend by provider, account, region and type, and cumulative cost per resource and per group.
- Cost Flow: a four-column Sankey diagram (for example provider, account, type, team) that you drill into by clicking. Nodes with reclaimable savings link straight to the matching recommendations, and the URL reproduces the exact view.
Exports
Cost reports and audit logs export to CSV; recommendations export to an Excel workbook with an executive summary sheet and a detail sheet. Savings in that summary are counted once per resource, so two levers on the same resource do not add up to more than it costs. Exports run in the background and arrive as a signed download link, also emailed for long jobs.
Related: showback by team and tag, cost per business unit, and amortized vs unblended cost.
Questions we get a lot.
Do I need billing sync for reports to work?
No. Rack-rate cost is available as soon as an account is connected. Billing sync replaces it with billed cost resource-day by resource-day.
Why does the team breakdown not add up to the invoice?
Charges that belong to no resource, such as taxes or data transfer, are included in organisation totals but cannot be attributed to a team, so attribution views exclude them.