User Cost Attribution Cost Validation FAQs
This article addresses User Cost Attribution FAQs.
What are "Other Costs?"
When processing costs during a build, user cost attribution categorizes them into buckets to help describe them in the context of your AVD environment.
These costs are evaluated on a per-resource basis, and categorized based on the following criteria:
Resource type
Service name
Additional metadata
Any costs that don’t fit within this criteria set are automatically put into the "Other Costs" bucket.
Bucket | Costs |
|---|---|
| VMs & Disks | VMs with 1+ sessions Personal VMs Disks attached to these VMs |
| Storage & FSLogix | Storage Accounts |
| Images | Images Galleries |
| Network | Bandwidth Network Transfer |
| Log Analytics | Log Analytics Workspaces |
| Other | SaaS VMs with 0 Sessions All other resources included (based on your configuration) |
Because of this, the bulk of costs in the "Other Costs" bucket are dependent on the subscription being costed, and what resources have been included in your configuration.
To understand what specific costs make up your "Other Costs," refer to the section below.
How can I view my "Other Costs"?
Nerdio Manager Tooltips
Within Nerdio Manager User Cost Attribution, the "Other Costs" table includes a tooltip that shows the distribution of costs among SaaS, PaaS, and other miscellaneous costs.
This tooltip gives a high-level overview of the split of "Other Costs" among SaaS, PaaS, and other resource types. This is because SaaS and PaaS costs are commonly the highest contributing costs to the "Other Costs" bucket.
Power BI Template and Connector
User Cost Attribution provides a custom-built Power BI template and connector file. This connector allows you to directly import your User Cost Attribution data into the provided template through the Power BI desktop application.
The provided template includes a predefined report called "Other Cost Detail," which offers a detailed breakdown of the costs in the "Other Costs" bucket.
This includes a view of costs by service name, costs by resource group, and a table listing all individual resources in the bucket, with columns highlighting their resource type, service name, and meter.
Work with the Resource Cost Detail Export
The Resource Cost Detail export offers a list of the individual resources/costs that contributed to the User Cost Attribution report. This includes information about the resource (resource group, type, and meter), as well as a column of buckets you can use to filter down to the "Other Costs" bucket.
Note: The Cost Attribution Report in Nerdio Manager bundles the VM, SaaS, and AVD Platform buckets into a single "Other Cost" bucket. When inspecting the individual rows in the cost detail export Excel file, you need to filter down to these sub-buckets instead.
To work with the resource cost detail export:
From the Shared cost allocation method drop-down, select Unallocated.
Note: The Unallocated method has a lower complexity than the other methods and preserves resource identifying data.
From the Select export action menu, select the Resource cost detail export.
Open the downloaded Excel file.
Select Data > Filter.
Filter the Bucket column for the following values:
VM
SaaS
AVD Platform
What are "Unallocated Costs?"
When a user records a session on an AVD VM, they receive a portion of the direct AVD VM (and associated disk) costs based on the length of their session. These costs are "Allocated" costs and assigned directly to the user. If a VM was online for longer than the length of the sessions on that VM, that leaves a portion of the costs as "Unallocated." These unallocated costs are then distributed to users based on the selected report type.
How can I validate my costs?
When building a report, User Cost Attribution sources the costs from the Cost Management tool available in Azure. It considers all costs for the subscription, then filters down the costs to use based on the selected tags for the configuration.
Use the Report Validation Tool
In Nerdio Manager 6.1.1 and later, User Cost Attribution introduced a Report Validation tool. The Report Validation can be used to perform a health check of the costs and session data for a given month/configuration.
Navigate to Settings > Integrations.
In the User cost attribution tile, select Report validation.
Enter the following information:
Configuration: From the drop-down list, select the configuration.
Month: Select the month.
Report type: From the drop-down list, select the report type.
Once you have entered the desired information, select Run.
This check evaluates this data in its Raw state, before the costs were filtered and attributed to users according to sessions, and in its Calculated state, after the same filtering and attribution process. The calculated costs are what is shown in the main Cost Attribution report.
With this validation data, and a view of your subscription costs in Cost Management, you can validate the following:
Validate | How |
|---|---|
| Were any costs lost when processing and attributing to users? | In the validation file:
Check:
|
| Were all the costs properly fetched from my subscription(s)? | In the validation file:
In Azure Cost Management:
Check:
|
Without the Report Validation Tool
For users on Nerdio Manager versions prior to 6.1.1, you can validate costs by comparing the subscription costs in Azure Cost Management against the costs in User Cost Attribution.
This comparison requires filtering Cost Management by the same set of tags in the User Cost Attribution configuration.
However, when doing so, you need to be mindful of the following:
Some resource types cannot be picked up by Cost Management in Azure when filtering by Tags. These include SaaS costs and Gallery-Image costs, which are common for Nerdio-managed AVD environments.
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