Shared Cost Allocation
Overview
Virtual Tags in OneLens not only help you group untagged costs but also allow you to allocate those costs—either directly or across multiple cost centers. With flexible sharing methods like even split, fixed proportion, and weighted distribution, you get fine-grained control over how costs are tracked and reported.
Why Allocate Shared Cost
In most cloud environments, you deal with services and resources that don’t belong to any one team. Platform services like CloudWatch, central storage buckets, shared networking, or monitoring tools often show up under a single cost center—usually the team that set them up. As a result, your cost visibility becomes skewed, and other teams escape accountability despite consuming shared services.
With OneLens, you can solve this by assigning such shared costs fairly across the right cost centers. Whether you want to divide costs equally, assign a fixed percentage, or let OneLens distribute costs based on usage, you stay in control—without needing AWS-native tags.
You do all this using Virtual Tags, right from within OneLens.
What You Can Do
When setting up Virtual Tags, you can optionally define how costs associated with a tag value are allocated. You can:
Assign all costs to a single cost center
Distribute costs across multiple cost centers by:
Even Split Divide the cost equally among selected cost centers, regardless of usage.
Fixed Proportion Manually assign percentage splits to reflect planned ownership or budgeting.
Weighted Allocation Automatically split cost based on each cost center’s actual usage or contribution to the bill.
How You Can Allocate Cost
Create a Virtual Tag
→ Learn how to create How to Create a Virtual Tag
Define a Value with Conditions
Add a new value and define its matching conditions. For example:
Field:
ServiceOperator:
IsValue:
CloudWatch
This will match all CloudWatch-related charges.
Enable Cost Allocation
While adding a value inside the tag:
Click on Allocate Cost.
Choose between Direct or Shared Allocation.
Use the "Allocate To" dropdown to pick the one cost center that should receive 100% of the cost.
Follow these steps to share the cost among multiple cost centers:
Select a Cost Center Category This helps narrow down the list of eligible cost centers.
Pick the Cost Centers Choose the specific cost centers that will receive a portion of the cost.
Choose the Allocation Type:
Even Split
Divides cost equally between the selected cost centers.
Fixed Proportion
Lets you assign specific percentages (e.g., 50%, 25%, 25%) to each center.
Weighted Allocation
Automatically distributes cost based on: • % of Total Bill (e.g., based on last month's spend) • % of Total of Selected Cost Centers (more precise within the chosen group)
Example Use Case
If your central data pipeline (e.g., a Redshift cluster) supports multiple departments, and you want to allocate the cost accordingly:
Create a virtual tag value called
Shared Data Infra.Define matching rules using fields like
Service = Redshift.Allocate cost using shared allocation:
Cost Center Category:
DepartmentsCost Centers:
Analytics,Product,FinanceAllocation Type: Fixed Proportion → 40% Analytics, 40% Product, 20% Finance
This ensures shared resources are accounted for fairly—without requiring manual tracking or external spreadsheets
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