• You are familiar with the concepts around Red Hat Lightspeed cost management. For information, see What is Red Hat Lightspeed cost management.
• You have a Red Hat Lightspeed subscription.
• You are logged in to the Hybrid Cloud Console with Cost Administrator or Organization Administrator permissions. For information about configuring user roles, see Limit access to cost management resources. Note

  You cannot log in to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console with your email unless your email is your Red Hat login. For more information, see Finding your login.

• Optional: You have a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Most cost management users use cost management with Red Hat OpenShift. However, it is possible to use cost management with a public cloud, without Red Hat OpenShift.

Only Organization Administrators or users with the User Access Administrator role can create a Cloud Administrator group. If you do not have one of these roles, use the Hybrid Cloud Console virtual assistant to request your Organization Administrator to create the Cloud Administrator group.

Enter request access in the Hybrid Cloud Console virtual assistant and then follow the instructions.

For information about finding the Hybrid Cloud Console virtual assistant, see Using the AI assistants in Getting Started in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.

The Cost Management Metrics Operator collects usage metrics on the resources within your OpenShift cluster. When you configure the operator, you also create an OpenShift integration. For details, follow the steps in Integrate OpenShift Container Platform data into cost management.

By adding an integration within the Hybrid Cloud Console, you can connect to cloud providers. To use cost management to monitor your cloud costs, you must first create an integration. Cost management connects to an integration to retrieve and monitor cost data. Complete the steps in the following documents, depending on your requirements:

• Integrate Amazon Web Services (AWS) data into cost management
• Integrate Google Cloud data into cost management
• Integrate Microsoft Azure data into cost management

Tags, referred to as labels in OpenShift, are strings of custom metadata that you assign to resources. You can use tags to differentiate and allocate costs between various parts of your environment. For information about use cases and configuration, see Allocate costs to business units.

A cost model is a framework that uses raw costs and metrics to define calculations for your costs. You can record, categorize, and distribute the costs that the cost model generates to specific customers, business units, or projects. For information about creating cost models, see Reflect real-world costs.

• Cost models for Red Hat OpenShift

  The Cost Management Metrics Operator only collects usage metrics from OpenShift clusters. To analyze your costs, cost management determines a rate that is then applied to the usage information. This process depends on how your OpenShift cluster is configured:

  • OpenShift cluster running on a public cloud:

    You do not need to create a cost model if you are running OpenShift on a public cloud. However, you might want to create a cost model so that you can distribute costs.

    Cost management directly uses the rates provided in the cloud cost report and the usage data collected from OpenShift to determine the costs. For example, cost management can take from the public cloud report the costs of a virtual machine running in your OpenShift cluster and calculate the OpenShift usage costs. It can then distribute those costs to a specific namespace or development team. This includes managed services such as ROSA and ARO.

  • OpenShift cluster running on premise:

    You must create a cost model if you have an OpenShift cluster running on premise. This is so you can apply custom rates for your reported usage.

• Cost models for cloud integrations

  Cost models for cloud integrations allow you to supply a markup or discount to your infrastructure costs. They are not required to see your public cloud costs.

Now that your cost data is generated, you can analyze your results and make changes in your business. For information about cost analysis, see Visualize IT spending trends.