Elasticsearch Chargeback

FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice designed to maximize the business value of cloud usage. It enables timely, data-driven decision-making and fosters financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.

The Chargeback integration (and Chargeback module) helps users answer a key question: How is my organisation consuming the Elastic solution, and to which tenants can I allocate these costs?

Both Chargeback module and integration are based on the Elasticsearch Service Billing and Elasticsearch integrations. Their purpose is to provide data for chargeback calculations, offering a breakdown of chargeable units per:

• Deployment
• Data tier
• Data stream
• Day

Support

Chargeback is created and supported by Elastic Field (Customer Engineering), not Elastic Product. It is not generally available (GA). While it remains in technical preview, get help through Field—for example your Elastic account team or the Elastician who shared this work with you. Standard Elastic Support does not cover it until that is explicitly arranged.

When Chargeback reaches GA, Field will coordinate with Elastic Support to put an official support model in place for entitled customers.

Choosing between the Chargeback integration and Chargeback module

The recommended approach is to use the Chargeback integration because of the following:

• Our limited team cannot maintain more than one stream
• All focus will be on the integration
• The "module" has much more moving parts and is more difficult to set up, and is therefore prone to more issues

The only reason you should choose the "module" in favour of the integration is if you cannot upgrade your monitoring cluster to 8.18 or later, and is stuck on 8.17.1 or later.

Installation options

• For the Chargeback Integration: Follow the integration/Instructions.md to install the integration.
• For the Chargeback module: Follow the module/Instructions.md to install the module.

Troubleshooting

If the Chargeback dashboard is empty after install, see integration/docs/troubleshooting.md (step-by-step checks for billing/usage data, transforms, lookup indices, and configuration).