Resource labelling

Labels are a flexible way to attach custom information to your cloud resources to support audits, reporting, and cost allocation. For example, many organisations want to monitor costs incurred by departments, teams, or individuals. By assigning labels with the corresponding information, that data will also appear in your FOCUS export.

How to add labels

Many products already support labels, including IaaS services (for example, servers, volumes, and image storage), database services (MongoDB Flex, PostgreSQL Flex), and Application Load Balancer. More products will offer labels in the future. When adding or modifying a server with the API or through Terraform, you can add a map of key-value pairs as labels.

If you create a server through the API, in addition to other fields you can add:

...
"labels": {
  "team": "compliant-coders",
  "department": "IT",
  "product-id": "hello-world-app"
},
...

Using labels in FOCUS

Labels assigned to a resource appear in the FOCUS tag column of your FOCUS report. Once you devise and roll out a labelling strategy across relevant cloud resources, FinOps practitioners can enable capabilities such as:

• Allocation
• Budgeting
• Invoicing and chargeback
• Reporting and analytics

For more information, see FOCUS.