Tagging for Cost Tracking

Eventually, Azure billing at Cornell will be automated within KFS, like AWS. Once that automation is complete, you will be able to customize which KFS account is charged for individual Azure resources by tagging with a "Cost Center" tag.

Even before the Azure-KFS billing integration is implemented (i.e. right now), you can use CloudCheckr reports to summarize billing data by "Cost Center" so that your financial folks can manually target costs for specific Azure resources to specific KFS accounts. 

Cost Center Tag

• Will be used to facilitate automated billing via the Cornell KFS system. Expected integration date: TBA
• Any Azure resource with that tag will be billed directly to the provided KFS account number.
• Anything in a Cornell Azure subscription that is not tagged (or cannot be tagged) will be billed to the Cornell KFS account number associated with the Azure subscription as a whole. 

• Note that applying the "Cost Center" tag to a resource does not retroactively adjust the billing data for the resource, prior to the tag being set.

Tag key/name: "Cost Center" (single space included between "Cost" and "Center")

Tag value formats:

• A seven-character KFS account number. 
  OR
• A seven-character KFS account number, followed by a hyphen, followed by a sub-account number. 
  OR
• A fully qualified KFS accounting string as outlined here: https://www.dfa.cornell.edu/accounting/chartofaccounts/transactionstring
  • Under this scheme, the parts of the accounting string labeled as optional in the link above can be left off, but a total of six hyphens are required.

Tagging Best Practice and Recommendations