Working with Cost Buckets

Cost buckets are Troposphere’s primary tool for organising cloud spending. They let you group costs from any combination of connections and resources into a structure that reflects how your business actually operates.

Creating a cost bucket#

1. Navigate to Costs > Cost Buckets in the sidebar and click the New button in the page header.
2. In the Create Cost Bucket dialog, fill in:
   • Name – a descriptive label for the bucket.
   • Parent Cost Bucket – leave as No Parent for a top-level bucket, or pick an existing bucket to nest underneath.
   • Label – an optional short tag shown alongside the bucket name in tables.
   • Budget Tracking – toggle on if you want to track spend against a budget and receive threshold alerts.
   • If budget tracking is on, choose a Budget Mode:
     • Own Budget – the bucket has its own fixed monthly budget. Enter the amount in the Budget field.
     • Rollup from Children – the bucket’s effective budget is calculated as the sum of its children’s budgets.
3. Click Add Cost Bucket.

Building a hierarchy#

Cost buckets can be nested to mirror your organisational structure. A common pattern is to create top-level buckets for business units, with child buckets for teams or projects underneath. Costs roll up automatically from child buckets to their parents, giving leadership a high-level view while teams retain granular detail.

To nest an existing bucket, open it from the table, click Edit in the row action menu, and pick a different Parent Cost Bucket.

Assigning costs#

Once a bucket exists, open it by clicking its name in the table. Three methods are available for associating cost with the bucket, each with its own button on the bucket view:

• Add Connection – pulls every resource on the chosen connection into the bucket. You can also set a Split Percentage so that only a fraction of the connection’s cost flows to this bucket, with the remainder left available for allocation elsewhere.
• Add Resource – pick a single resource to include, useful for shared infrastructure that should be split across buckets. Each resource also supports a Split Percentage.
• Add Tag – defines a tag filter by Key and Value. Any resource with a tag matching that exact key/value pair is automatically associated with the bucket.

You can remove any assignment – connection, resource, or tag – by clicking the delete icon next to it on the bucket view.

Editing and deleting buckets#

Each row on the Cost Buckets table has a three-dot action menu with:

• View Details – open the bucket’s page.
• Edit – change the name, parent, label, or budget configuration in the Update Cost Bucket dialog.
• Delete – remove the bucket. Deletion does not affect the underlying cost data. Child buckets are reparented to the deleted bucket’s parent.