Why attribute telemetry cost by team?

Your collectors send telemetry to Grafana Cloud, and the usage appears as one total. Without a label that identifies who owns the data, you can’t tell which team drives the cost.

Fleet Management already knows who owns each collector through the team attribute. Cost Management and Billing attributes cost by labels on your telemetry. To connect the two, you add the team attribute to your metrics as a label.

How the pieces connect

In this path, you work with three parts:

• Collector attributes: The team attribute you assigned in Fleet Management identifies the owner of each collector.
• Configuration pipeline: A pipeline you create reads the team attribute of each collector and adds it to the metrics as a team label.
• Cost attribution: Cost Management and Billing uses the team label to report cost per team.

Benefits of attributing cost by team

Attribute cost by team to gain the following advantages:

• Label metrics from all matching collectors with a single pipeline
• Reuse the team attribute you already maintain instead of editing each collector
• See which teams drive metrics cost, and extend the label to logs and traces to see theirs
• Find unattributed cost, which shows where labeling is missing
• Export cost by team for financial reporting

In the next milestone, you create the pipeline that adds the team label to your metrics.