Cost Management
meshStack provides central multi-cloud billing. It can automatically collect usage information from all your cloud platforms and provides central access to cost and usage data.
This information will be consolidated by project, providing an overview of resource usage, including detailed insights into when and how long your resources were running, along with the associated costs.
Payment Information
A payment method is used to ensure transparent budget management and allocate costs back to the responsible team within your organization. One common example of a payment method is a cost center, which helps categorize and track expenses specific to a team or project. Please find more detailed information about payment methods and how they could be used here.
As the cost and usage data is consolidated per project, payment methods are created in a workspace and assigned per project in meshStack.
Reviewing Metering Data
Tenant Usage Reports
A tenant usage report provides usage information of one tenant (project representation in a specific platform). This report shows for example all resources like VMs, Storage, Public IPs, etc.
Tenant Usage Reports can be accessed in the tenant control plane under Financials > Usage Reports. meshStack generates a tenant usage report for every usage period (monthly).
meshStack defines usage period as starting from the first day of a month to the last day of the month in UTC.
You also have access to a preview report of the current period (e.g. the current month), to always have full control of your resources and their usage.
From a Tenant Usage Report you can also access a Detailed Report to see every single resource consumption. That means you can e.g. see whether a resource was running for 3 hours, stopped for 5 hours and then started again for another 6 hours.
Partner accounts can access tenant usage reports for all their assigned meshWorkspaces in the Administration Area via Platforms > Usage Reports.
Note that unit costs for Azure and GCP services are not supported. Therefore, the unit costs are not available in the Tenant Usage Reports for those platforms.
Chargeback Statements
As an analogy from banking, you can think of a chargeback statement like a credit card statement you receive at the end of the month about your usage charged to your payment method.
This chargeback statement is attached to each project and each chargeback is composed of tenant usage reports, which are reports for each tenant. For example, if your project uses both AWS and GCP, you will have one chargeback that combines two tenant usage reports. To check your chargebacks go to Financials > Chargeback Statements in your workspace. Or as admin go to Chargeback Statements page under the FinOps section.
Chargebacks are finalized at the beginning of each month for the previous usage period with an offset of a few days to allow cloud providers to complete their reports. However, each chargeback only includes data from the month it was used. For example, an October chargeback, that was finalized on November 6th, will only include cloud usage from October.
Chargeback statements consist of line items showing the individual booking entries made into a chargeback account.
When booking a tenant usage report, meshStack splits up the report's netAmount by seller and product group into
individual entries. This split allows cloud foundation teams to process chargeback for different kinds of usage
like cloud provider cost vs. internal overhead fees.
Chargeback Statement Previews
meshStack also regularly generates a preview of the chargeback statement for the current month, providing real-time cost data. This preview includes all tenant usage reports that meshStack expects to be finalized before the end of the chargeback period. The chargeback statement preview is available on the Chargeback Statements page, where it will be marked with an Open status label in the Status column.
Please note that meshStack currently only generates a preview for the currently active chargeback period. A tenant usage report that will finalize in the next chargeback period will not be included in the current period's preview.
Tags and Payment Methods
The active payment method at the end of the reporting period will appear on the chargeback statement, so your organization's accountant will know whom to send the bill to. Tags associated with this payment method will also be included in the chargeback statement for easier financial management. So chargeback statement for June 2024 will show the tags and payment method that were set as on the last day of the month in this case June 30th.
When setting a payment method for the entire year, accountants should ensure that a payment method valid for the year 2022, for example, has an expiration date of January 1, 2023, rather than December 31, 2022. This ensures the payment method remains valid throughout the entire year.
Exporting Chargeback Statements
It is possible to do an export from these views by clicking on the "CSV Export" button. This export will contain the line items (see above) of all the chargeback statements currently in the view. The line item data is suitable for feeding into chargeback processing, e.g. importing it to an ERP System to transfer budgets between cost centers.
For customers who export chargeback statements on a monthly basis, the following recommendation applies: chargeback statements of the previous month should be processed no earlier than one day after the configured finalization date, at 7 a.m. (German local time). By default, chargeback statements are finalized at the 6th of a month, therefore, they can be processed starting at the 7th of a month at 7 a.m. If you are unsure about the configuration of the finalization day of chargebacks in your meshStack, please contact our support team.
Chargeback Statements also contain billing information per line item. Your platform team can configure which information meshStack should include as billing information in chargeback statements.
Platform teams typically configure billing information to payment method name, identifier, expiration date and amount as well as any workspace tags, project tags and payment method tags.
You can review this billing information in meshPanel when opening chargeback statement. CSV Exports of chargeback statements also include the configured billing information.
Late Bills From Providers
Late bills from providers or any other corrections that arrive after the chargeback statement has been finalized will still be attributed to the month in which the usage occurred. This means that finalized chargebacks will be updated accordingly.
For example, if the September 2024 chargeback statement is finalized on October 6, 2024, but Azure generates an additional expense for September usage on October 10, the September chargeback statement will be updated to reflect this change. The statement will display an "Updated" label in the status column on the Chargeback Statements page. Additionally, the "Generation Date" column will indicate the most recent update to the statement.
When you open the dedicated chargeback statement, you can also identify what exactly changed by navigating down below the chargeback statement, where you will see the cancelled chargeback statements. You can expand a cancelled chargeback statement and compare it with the current one to see which changes were applied.
Transparency around updates in finalized chargeback statements in CSV exports and API will follow soon. Currently only the latest data is reflected in CSV export and via the API.
Retroactive Payment Methods
The following only applies, if payment methods are configured to be required for chargeback statements (you can request this via meshcloud support). If a project doesn’t have a payment method because the previous one expired and no new method has been set, chargeback statements will not be generated. Tenant usage reports, however, will still be created and finalized without a payment method. When a new payment method is added, the system retroactively generates chargeback statements for all missing months, applying the newly added payment method. Tenant usage reports for the affected months are updated to include the new payment method, resulting in updated labels for these reports. Additionally, via the meshTenantUsageReport API, you can check the updated reports by using the finalizedAfter parameter with the date when the payment method expired.
Example:
- Let’s say it’s February 2025, and your payment method for 2024 expired. If you haven’t added a new one yet, no chargeback statements will be generated for January and February 2025, but tenant usage reports will still be available without an associated payment method.
- Now, imagine you add a new payment method at the end of March 2025. In this case, the system will regenerate tenant usage reports and generate chargeback statements for January, February, and March 2025, applying the new payment method to those months.
- The regenerated tenant usage reports and chargeback statements with the added payment method will display an updated label under the "Status" column on the chargeback and tenant usage reports pages. You can also identify these updates via the meshTenantUsageReport API by specifying the finalizedAfter parameter with the date when the payment method expired.