Understand cost distribution in cost management

Costs can belong to four different groups: platform, worker unallocated, network unattributed, and storage unattributed costs.

Platform costs
Costs that incur from running the OpenShift Container Platform. Platform costs include the cost of all projects with the label Default. These namespaces and projects contain openshift- or kube- in the name. These projects were not created by the user but are required for OpenShift to run. You can optionally add namespaces and projects to platform costs.
Worker unallocated costs
Costs that represent any unused part of your worker node’s usage and request capacity.
Network unattributed costs
Costs associated with ingress and egress network traffic for individual nodes.
Storage unattributed costs
The amount of storage on a cloud provider’s physical disk that is not being used. The cost model uses the the cloud provider’s cost report to determine the size of the physical disk. It then calculates how much of the disk is not being used by subtracting the disk size from the persistent volume claim’s capacity.

Distribute costs
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To configure the distribution of platform and worker unallocated costs into your projects, you can set costs to Distribute or Do not distribute. When you create a cost model, the costs are set to Distribute by default. A value of zero is applied to the platform projects costs because the costs are distributed to user projects.

The costs distribute into your project costs according to the sum of the effective CPU or the Memory usage of your cost model. Most users use the default Distribute setting to track platform and worker unallocated costs for their organizations.

If you instead set the costs to Do not distribute, the costs of each Platform project are displayed individually instead of spread across all of the projects. The worker unallocated cost still is calculated, but it appears as an individual project in the OpenShift details page. With this option, you cannot see how the costs would distribute to user projects.

You can always distribute platform or worker unallocated costs independently of each other, or you can choose to distribute none of them.

Calculate costs
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Cost management uses effective usage to calculate both platform and worker unallocated costs, in addition to project costs.

To distribute platform costs, cost management uses the following formula:

(individual user project effective usage) / (sum of usage for all user project’s effective usage) * (platform cost)

To distribute worker unallocated costs, cost management uses the following formula:

(individual user project effective usage) / (sum of usage for all user project’s effective usage) * (worker unallocated cost)