Showback: Attribute Cloud Cost to Teams and Tags
A cost that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. Showback puts a name next to every line.
Two ways to attribute
By team. Resources are assigned to owning teams. When a resource is shared by several teams its cost is split equally between them, and resources with no team are tracked in their own unattributed bucket instead of disappearing. Each team has a view by provider and by resource type, a list of its resources, and a trend chart.
By tag. Cost is attributed by AWS tags, GCP labels and Azure tags, plus accepted Smart Tags. Each key and value pair receives the full cost of the resources that carry it, with no splitting, and the source of the tag (set in the cloud, or derived) is shown. The Tags tab lists flattened key:value pairs with their own trends and filters by key, value, provider and type. A tag coverage widget on the dashboard shows tagged against untagged spend.
Seeing the flow
The Cost Flow view draws the period’s spend as a four-column Sankey, by default provider, account, type and team. Turn on the unattributed-teams highlight and spend with no owner stands out immediately; turn on the savings overlay and the flows with reclaimable spend are marked. Clicking a node narrows the diagram, and the URL captures the exact view to share.
What showback is and is not
Showback shows attributed cost. Charges that belong to no resource, such as taxes or data transfer, are included in the organisation’s invoice-level totals but not in team or tag breakdowns, so a team’s figure is what its resources cost. When billing sync is set up, attribution is refreshed with billed cost.
Making attribution stick
- Budgets per team, tracked live against the same numbers.
- Team-scoped access, so each team sees its own spend and recommendations.
- Ownership detection: ZopNight derives who created and last changed each resource from cloud activity logs, which helps assign the untagged remainder.
- Smart Tags fill in missing tag values from resource facts.
Showback is the first step toward chargeback; the difference is covered in showback vs chargeback. See also Smart Tags, unit economics per team, and cost allocation.
Questions we get a lot.
How is a shared resource split?
Equally across the teams that own it. Tag attribution does not split: each tag value gets the full cost of the resources carrying it.
Why does the sum of teams differ from the invoice?
Unattributed spend such as taxes and data transfer is in organisation totals but has no resource to assign to a team.