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Glossary

This Glossary/Terminology section was created to support the understanding of terms and concepts used on the platform. Our goal is to provide clear and concise definitions that facilitate the understanding of functionalities and operations, ensuring that users have a general understanding of the information.

This section is organized alphabetically from A to Z.

Adjustments

They are credit or debit adjustments made to the invoice, which may occur due to billing errors, charge disputes, or changes in contract terms.

GCP - Credit and Debit Notes:

  • Credit Notes: Applied to reduce the total invoice amount. They are used in cases such as tax refunds, error corrections, or credits due to SLA violations (service unavailability).

  • Debit Notes: Applied to increase the invoice amount. They usually occur for tax regularization or when the provider identifies that a service was previously underbilled.

  • Retroactivity: The adjustment may appear on the current invoice, but refer to consumption or events that occurred in previous months.

  • Traceability: Each adjustment has a unique document ID, allowing the corresponding note to be located in the Google Billing Console for detailed verification.

  • Transparency: On the platform, adjustments are separated from actual usage costs to make it easier to identify variations caused by the provider's financial corrections.

Cost center

A cost center is an organizational unit within the company that monitors and aggregates expenses related to specific activities, workspaces, or departments. It serves as a financial control tool, essential for efficient resource allocation. Cost centers are used to filter and analyze resource consumption. They help identify budget overruns and areas requiring financial adjustments.

Important

We do not create cost centers in your organization; we only reflect the cost centers created in your organization within the platform as a way to subdivide resource consumption according to the budget.

No Cost Center (cost center name)

To simplify the search, we use the term "No Cost Center" to identify all Workspaces not associated with any specific cost center.

Credits

Amounts established through provider contracts or incentive programs, used to offset service usage costs for defined periods.

  • GCP: The displayed credit amount includes Free Tier (monthly free usage limits) and Promotional Credits (trial or contractual). Free Tier is consumed first, and after it is exhausted for the month, promotional credits begin to be consumed.

  • AWS: Credits are automatically applied to invoices to cover eligible service costs until they are exhausted or expired.

  • Azure: Tracking is focused on monitoring free service usage and account balances to avoid excess charges.

  • OCI: Prepaid credits (Universal Credits) that are debited according to actual Oracle Cloud service usage and must be used within the contractual term.

Learn more: GCP, AWS, Azure, and OCI.

Forecast

An estimate of future costs based on current and historical spending. The forecast aims to provide an early view of projected costs, allowing finance and operations teams to identify consumption trends and adjust their resources or budgets as needed.

How it's calculated

  • Past months:
    There is no forecast for past months.

  • Current month: The forecast is calculated based on the average daily cost to date, this way the average cost is projected for the rest of the month. Before calculating the forecast for the current month, we consider a minimum date (2 or 3 days after the start of the month, depending on whether the month started on a weekend). This condition prevents the forecast from being calculated too early, ensuring that we have enough cost data for a more accurate estimate. We multiply the average daily cost by the total number of days in the month to obtain an estimate of the total cost until the end of the month. We add planned cost adjustments to the final value for greater accuracy.

  • Future months: For future months the forecasted value is equal to the one defined for that month's budget.

Recommendations

Recommendations are automatic optimization suggestions that help improve efficiency and reduce costs. We currently aggregate the following recommendation types:

Idle

  • Refers to resources that are inactive or underutilized. These resources generate costs but they have little to no workload on them.
  • Examples: A VM that is provisioned but not performing any tasks, or a database the does not process any queries frequently.

Underutilized

  • Refere-se a recursos que estão em uso mas com capacidade muito acima do necessário para a carga de trabalho atual. Esses recursos podem ser redimensionados para uma configuração mais econômica sem impactar o desempenho.
  • Exemplo: uma instância de máquina virtual configurada com alta capacidade de CPU e memória mas que utiliza apenas uma pequena fração destes recursos.

Reserved

  • Refers to a purchase or allocation of resources made in advance for a specific period of time, in exchange for a significant discount on the cost
  • Example: A virtual machine instance with stable and predictable workloads, where resource consumption follows a pattern, allowing you to optimize costs with discounts.

Others

  • Other types not listed above.

Region

Regions are specific geographic areas where the cloud provider’s data centers are located and where resources can be allocated. For more details about regions, refer to the provider’s documentation: GCP, AWS, Azure, and OCI

Resource

A resource is an allocated component of cloud infrastructure or service, such as a virtual machine, a database, or a serverless function, which generates costs according to its level of usage.
Learn more: GCP, AWS, Azure, and OCI

Role assignment

The attribution of roles is carried out during the process of invitating new users to the platform, determining the functionalities and permissions they will have access to.

  • Basic category
    • Viewer → Read-only access throughout the platform with no permission to modify resources or data.
    • Editor → Permission to manage cost centers: can create, add, and delete cost centers. Cannot edit company, organization, invites, users, or permission settings.
    • Owner → Perpermission to edit all resources without restrictions. Examples:
      • Invite new user: Can add new users to their company on the platform and assign permissions.
      • Manage permissions: Can change permissions of all users in their company.
      • Manage company: Can update company data.

Service

In cloud providers, a service is a functionality offered to meet specific needs, such as computing, storage, or analytics, accessible in a scalable way and upon demand. Designed to abstract infrastructure complexity, services allow users to focus on objectives rather than managing hardware/software. Services can be classified in various categories, the major ones being:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Provides virtualized hardware resources such as servers, storage, and networking (AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine).

  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): Provides a complete environment for application development and deployment (AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine).

  • Software as a Service (SaaS): Delivers ready-to-use, web-accessible applications (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365).

Note

These are some of the best-known categories, but there are others, such as FaaS (Function as a Service), DaaS (Desktop as a Service) and CaaS (Containers as a Service), which meet more specific needs.

Usage Category

  • SKU (GCP) → Acronym for Stock Keeping Unit. In the context of cloud providers it refers to a unique code that identifiies a product or part of a service that is being offered by the provider.
  • Usage Category → A usage category refers to different types of service consumption on AWS, such as On-Demand, Reserved, or Spot Instances, allowing for a detailed analysis of the associated costs.
  • Usage Category → A usage category is a classification that groups together the different types of services and resources consumed, such as computing, storage and networking, facilitating the management and analysis of costs on the platform.
  • SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) or Part Number → Refers to the categorization of infrastructure components (such as instances, volumes, or buckets) used to apply access policies and organize cost measurement. Each resource type has a specific name used in usage and billing reports.

Support

An additional fee charged for customer service and technical assistance, varying according to the contracted support level, and ranging from help with technical issues to consulting services. On the Omnicloud platform, we fetch and reflect the support amount exported by the provider to ensure cost data stays up to date.

To understand which services are offered and how the billing model works (which may vary between fixed fees or a percentage of consumption), refer to the provider's official documentation.

  • GCP - Google Cloud Customer Care

    • Plans: Standard, Enhanced, Premium.
    • Billing model: Based on a fixed fee or a variable percentage of monthly consumption.

  • AWS - AWS Support

    • Plans: Developer, Business, Enterprise.
    • Billing model: Usually calculated as a percentage of monthly resource spend.

  • Azure - Support Plans

    • Plans: Developer, Standard, Professional Direct, Unified.
    • Billing model: Varies by plan, focused on technical support and consulting.

  • OCI - Oracle Cloud Support Policy

    • How it works: Support is generally included in services or contracted through a direct commercial agreement, rather than following fixed shelf-plan models on the platform.

Learn more: GCP, AWS, Azure, and OCI.

Usage commitments

Usage commitments → Usage commitments allow users to receive discounts by committing to a minimum level of resource consumption for defined periods. Each provider establishes its own rules and conditions, so our role is to reflect these values according to each provider's definitions. In general, providers offer more than one commitment model, ranging from stricter options (based on specific resources) to more flexible options (based on spend).

  • GCP - Committed Use Discounts (CUD: Resource-based and Spend-based):

    • Automatic discount: Applied to continuous use of specific compute resources (e.g., vCPU and memory).
    • Available models:
      • Resource-based model (more restrictive).
      • Spend-based CUD model (more flexible).
    • Financial commitment: The contracted amount is charged throughout the full term, regardless of actual usage.
    • Cancellation: Not allowed after purchase.
    • Fixed price: Defined at activation and maintained until the end of the contract.
    • Scope: Linked to resource type and region (in the resource-based model).
    • Renewal: Can be configured to renew automatically at the end of the term.

  • AWS - Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans:

    • Automatic discount: Applied to eligible instances compared to on-demand pricing.
    • Available models:
      • Reserved Instances (more restrictive model, instance-based).
      • Savings Plans (more flexible model, spend-based, and often used as an alternative to RI).
    • Financial commitment: Payment is required regardless of effective usage.
    • Capacity: Guaranteed only in some reservation types (e.g., zonal).
    • Flexibility: Allows attribute exchange (convertible instances) and Marketplace resale (RI only).
    • Expiration: No automatic renewal; at the end of the term, usage returns to standard pricing.

  • Azure - Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Savings Plans:

    • Automatic discount: Applied to eligible resources within the reservation scope.
    • Available models:
      • Reserved Instances (more restrictive model, tied to VM or VM family).
      • Savings Plan (more flexible model, spend-based, with a specific coverage scope).
    • Financial commitment: Associated with 1-year or 3-year terms.
    • Hourly application: The discount is applied per hour of usage.
    • Non-cumulative usage: Unused hours are not carried over.
    • Flexibility: Can be automatically applied to other compatible VMs in the same family.
    • Resource state: Stopped VMs continue consuming reservation capacity; deallocation is required to stop consumption.

  • OCI - Universal Credits (Commitment):

    • Credit model: Financial commitment based on advance credit purchase.
    • Volume discount: Applied according to total contracted value, reducing unit cost.
    • Flexibility: Can be used across services (Compute, Storage, Database, etc.) and regions.
    • Validity: Credits must be consumed within the contractual period (typically 12 months).
    • Non-cumulative usage: Unused credits expire at the end of the period.
    • Overage: Consumption above the contracted amount is billed separately at list price.

Workspace

  • Project → A container that organizes related resources/services and manages billing and permissions.
  • Account → The level at which resources are provisioned, including multiple VPCs, projects, and services.
  • Subscription → A billing account where resources are provisioned, policies and permissions are also managed through it.
  • Compartment → A compartment in OCI is a container used to organize and isolate resources, enabling access control and the application of security policies.