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Explore Your Costs

Once your data sources are connected, KOSTRA gives you a normalized view of spend across every provider. This guide shows how to explore costs with Cost Explorer and the Cost Map so you can answer “where is the money going?” quickly.

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Open Cost Explorer

  1. In the left navigation, open Cost Explorer.
  2. Choose the time period you want to analyze.
  3. Review the total spend and the breakdown for the period.
Cost Explorer draws on the normalized expense model, so Huawei Cloud spend appears next to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in the same units and the same view.

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Group and filter

The power of Cost Explorer is in slicing spend along the dimension you care about. You can break costs down and filter by:
  • Cloud / data source — compare spend across providers, or isolate a single Huawei Cloud account.
  • Pool — see spend by the team, project, or business-unit structure you have modeled.
  • Service — for example, compute, block storage, or object storage on any provider.
  • Region — where spend is concentrated geographically.
  • Resource type — the kind of resource driving cost.
  • Owner — the employee associated with a resource.
Combine filters to narrow in — for instance, one provider’s spend in a single region, grouped by service — and use the time controls to compare periods and spot trends.

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Read the Cost Map

The Cost Map answers a different question: where in the world is my spend? It plots cost by region on a map, so you can see geographic concentration at a glance — useful for data-residency reviews and for understanding where your footprint is concentrated.
  1. In the left navigation, open Cost Map.
  2. Review the regions where spend is concentrated; larger markers indicate higher cost.
  3. Select a region to see its detail.
KOSTRA maps every provider’s regions to their real-world locations — including Huawei Cloud, so an estate that spans providers others omit is represented in full rather than left partly off the map.

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From spend to action

Cost Explorer tells you what you spend; the rest of KOSTRA tells you what to do about it:
  • High spend on a service or region is often a cue to check Recommendations for optimization opportunities there.
  • Spend you cannot yet attribute to an owner is a cue to refine your Pools and Allocation Rules.
  • A workload that is expensive because of how it is architected is a cue to run a Modernization scan.

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Tips for a useful cost review

  • Start broad (all clouds, this month) and drill down, rather than starting from a single resource.
  • Group by pool first if your goal is accountability; group by service first if your goal is optimization.
  • Use period comparison to separate a real trend from a one-off spike.