Cost Tracking

Teabar provides detailed cost tracking to help you understand resource consumption, allocate costs to teams, and optimize cloud spending across all your ephemeral environments.

Overview

Cost tracking in Teabar covers:

• Real-time cost monitoring - See current spend as it accumulates
• Historical analysis - Review past spending patterns
• Cost allocation - Attribute costs to projects, teams, or users
• Budget alerts - Get notified before exceeding limits
• Optimization recommendations - Identify cost-saving opportunities

Viewing Costs

CLI

# View current month's costs
teabar costs show

# View costs for a specific project
teabar costs show --project my-project

# View costs for a specific environment
teabar costs show --env my-feature-env

# View costs for a date range
teabar costs show --from "2024-01-01" --to "2024-01-31"

# Group by dimension
teabar costs show --group-by project
teabar costs show --group-by user
teabar costs show --group-by environment

Example output:

Cost Summary: January 2024
Organization: acme-corp

Total Cost: $1,234.56

By Project:
  frontend        $456.78 (37%)
  backend         $389.12 (32%)
  data-pipeline   $245.67 (20%)
  infrastructure  $142.99 (11%)

By Resource Type:
  Compute         $678.90 (55%)
  Storage         $234.56 (19%)
  Network         $198.76 (16%)
  Other           $122.34 (10%)

Active Environments: 47
Average Cost/Environment: $26.27

Dashboard

Access the cost dashboard at https://app.teabar.dev/costs.

Features include:

• Interactive cost charts
• Drill-down by project, user, or resource
• Cost trend analysis
• Export to CSV/PDF

Cost Breakdown

By Resource Type

Teabar tracks costs across resource categories:

By Environment

# Detailed cost breakdown for an environment
teabar costs breakdown my-feature-env

Output:

Environment: my-feature-env
Period: 2024-01-01 to 2024-01-31
Total Cost: $45.67

Resource Breakdown:
  web (container)
    CPU: 2 vCPU × 720 hours        $28.80
    Memory: 4 GB × 720 hours       $11.52
    
  postgres (database)
    Instance: db.small × 720 hours  $3.60
    Storage: 10 GB                  $1.00
    
  redis (cache)
    Instance: cache.small × 720 hours $0.75

Network:
  Ingress: 50 GB                    $0.00
  Egress: 25 GB                     $2.25

Budget Management

Setting Budgets

Configure spending limits at different levels:

# Set monthly organization budget
teabar budget set --org acme-corp --monthly 5000

# Set daily spending limit
teabar budget set --org acme-corp --daily 200

Budget Alerts

Configure alerts when approaching budget limits:

# teabar.yaml
budgets:
  organization:
    monthly: 5000
    alerts:
      - threshold: 50%
        channels: [email:[email protected]]
      - threshold: 80%
        channels: [slack:#platform-costs]
      - threshold: 100%
        channels: [slack:#platform-costs, pagerduty:oncall]
        action: notify  # or 'block' to prevent new environments

  projects:
    frontend:
      monthly: 1000
      per_environment: 50
      alerts:
        - threshold: 90%
          channels: [slack:#frontend-team]

Budget Actions

When budgets are exceeded:

# Configure budget action
teabar budget set --project frontend --monthly 1000 --on-exceed block

Cost Allocation

Tags and Labels

Use tags to allocate costs to cost centers:

# Create environment with cost allocation tags
teabar env create my-feature-env 
  --tag team=platform 
  --tag cost-center=engineering 
  --tag [email protected]

Cost Reports by Tag

# Generate cost report by tag
teabar costs report --group-by tag:team

# Export for accounting
teabar costs export --group-by tag:cost-center --format csv --output costs.csv

Output:

Cost Report by Team
Period: January 2024

Team          Environments  Total Cost
platform      12            $456.78
frontend      8             $234.56
backend       15            $389.12
data          5             $154.10
-----------------------------------------
Total         40            $1,234.56

Cost Optimization

Recommendations

Teabar analyzes usage patterns and suggests optimizations:

# Get optimization recommendations
teabar costs optimize

Output:

Cost Optimization Recommendations

1. [HIGH] Idle Environments
   5 environments have been idle for >7 days
   Potential savings: $125/month
   
   Environments:
   - test-env-old (idle 14 days)
   - feature-abandoned (idle 21 days)
   - demo-staging (idle 10 days)
   
   Action: teabar env delete test-env-old feature-abandoned demo-staging

2. [MEDIUM] Oversized Resources
   3 environments are using <20% of allocated resources
   Potential savings: $89/month
   
   Environments:
   - api-staging: 4 vCPU allocated, 0.5 vCPU used
   - worker-test: 8 GB RAM allocated, 1.2 GB used
   
   Action: teabar env resize api-staging --cpu 1 --memory 2G

3. [LOW] Storage Cleanup
   12 GB of orphaned volumes detected
   Potential savings: $1.20/month
   
   Action: teabar storage prune --orphaned

Auto-Cleanup Policies

Configure automatic cleanup to reduce costs:

# teabar.yaml
cleanup:
  # Delete environments after inactivity
  idle_timeout: 7d
  
  # Delete environments after max lifetime
  max_lifetime: 30d
  
  # Exclude specific environments
  exclude:
    - production
    - staging
  
  # Notify before deletion
  notify_before: 24h
  notify_channels:
    - slack:#platform-alerts

Resource Right-Sizing

# Analyze resource usage and suggest sizes
teabar env analyze my-feature-env

# Auto-resize based on usage
teabar env resize my-feature-env --auto

# Set resource limits to prevent over-provisioning
teabar project config set resource_limits.max_cpu 4
teabar project config set resource_limits.max_memory 8G

Exporting Cost Data

CSV Export

# Export monthly costs to CSV
teabar costs export 
  --from "2024-01-01" 
  --to "2024-01-31" 
  --format csv 
  --output january-costs.csv

API Access

# Get costs via API (use OIDC token from teabar auth or Keycloak service account)
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TEABAR_TOKEN" 
  "https://api.teabar.dev/v1/costs?from=2024-01-01&to=2024-01-31"

Response:

{
  "period": {
    "from": "2024-01-01",
    "to": "2024-01-31"
  },
  "total": 1234.56,
  "currency": "USD",
  "breakdown": {
    "compute": 678.90,
    "storage": 234.56,
    "network": 198.76,
    "other": 122.34
  },
  "by_project": [
    {"project": "frontend", "cost": 456.78},
    {"project": "backend", "cost": 389.12}
  ]
}

Best Practices

1. Set budgets proactively - Configure limits before costs become an issue
2. Tag everything - Use consistent tags for cost allocation
3. Review weekly - Check cost trends and recommendations regularly
4. Enable auto-cleanup - Prevent idle environments from accumulating costs
5. Right-size resources - Start small and scale up based on actual usage
6. Use spot instances - For non-critical environments, enable spot pricing