Many companies struggle to make sense of cloud costs because reports are organized the way the cloud providers sees the world, not how the business is actually structured. Octo’s Cost Groups feature helps bridge that gap by letting you view and filter cloud spend in a way that aligns with your own teams, products, and initiatives.
A Cost Group in Octo is a customized view of your cloud costs and usage, built from flexible filters across vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP—such as account, service, region, usage type, instance, tags, and more.
By combining these attributes, Cost Groups let you reorganize raw cloud billing data into structured groupings that reflect how your organization is set up. This becomes the foundation for consistent reporting and analysis across teams, making it easier for stakeholders to explore and understand cloud spend from a single, reliable view.
Cloud billing data is often raw, technical, and structured around how providers expose resources—by account IDs, services, regions, and usage types. But businesses don’t plan or report that way. Leaders want to understand costs per team, per product, per environment, or even per customer.
This is where Cost Groups in Octo become valuable. They act as a translation layer between cloud billing and business reporting, giving finance, engineering, and leadership a shared lens on cloud spend. Instead of wrestling with provider-centric reports, stakeholders can quickly answer questions like “How much are we spending on this product?” or “What is the cost of this customer segment?” and use that insight to guide budgeting, optimization, and growth decisions.
In Octo, a Cost Group is defined by combinations of filters that decide which usage and cost line items are included. These filters work across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and attributes like account, service, region, usage type, instance, availability zone, API operation, invoice, and tags.
Typical filter criteria include:
These filters are combined using logical operations (is, is not, AND, OR) to form the logic of the Cost Group—essentially, the rule that says “include these costs, exclude those.”
Each Cost Group then produces a custom cost view tailored to a specific business question, like “production spend for Product A” or “costs for a particular customer segment.”
On top of manual Cost Groups, Octo also provides preconfigured Cost Group types for common business scenarios:
All of these—Manual, AI Cost, and Container Cost—are still Cost Groups under the hood. They just apply different combinations and filters so businesses can quickly get the views that matter most for their operations.
Example:
Imagine a company that wants to understand how much it spends each month to run Product A in production across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
They create a Cost Group in Octo that includes all resources tagged with Product = Product A and Environment = Production.
With this one view, they can quickly see total monthly spend, which services or regions cost the most, and where they can optimize—without digging through separate reports from each cloud provider.
Visibility: Gives finance, engineering, and business teams a shared, consistent view of the cloud spend that matters to them.
Accountability: Maps costs to the right team, product, or business unit so ownership and budget responsibility are clear.
Efficiency: Reduces time spent cleaning raw billing data and makes it easier to spot waste or misaligned resources inside each group.
Optimization: Highlights savings opportunities by showing which products, environments, or workloads are driving spend and should be optimized.
Multi-cloud unification: Standardizes how you group and report costs across AWS, Azure, and GCP, giving leadership a single view of total cloud spend.
A Cost Group is more than just a technical filter — it’s a business tool that lets you understand cloud costs in a way that reflects how your company is actually organized and operates. In FinOps practice, Cost Groups become a core building block for visibility, cost allocation, and ongoing optimization across your multi-cloud environment.
Ready to see this in action? If you’re using Octo, try creating your first Cost Group for a key product or environment and explore your cloud spend from a business view. You can learn more in the Cost Groups documentation or get started with Octo.
