Cohesity provides data protection and backup capabilities for workloads distributed across your cloud environments. Its resources can be organized through clusters, protection jobs, and policies to manage how workloads are protected and how backup operations are performed.
The cloud infrastructure supporting these activities can generate costs through storage, compute, networking, and data transfer services. As Cohesity deployments grow across AWS, Azure, and GCP, understanding which protection resources are contributing to your cloud spend becomes increasingly important.
CloudSpend associates cloud billing data with Cohesity resources using predefined Cohesity tags. This allows you to analyze spending according to the structure of your Cohesity environment, investigate changes in protection-related costs, and identify opportunities to improve the efficiency of your cloud data protection infrastructure.
Cohesity cost management is the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing cloud expenses associated with Cohesity data protection resources.
CloudSpend uses Cohesity-specific tags to associate infrastructure costs with clusters, protection jobs, and policies. This provides a more meaningful view of backup spending by connecting cloud infrastructure costs to the logical entities responsible for protecting workloads.
Effective Cohesity cost management requires you to monitor protection-related spending, understand how backup activity affects your cloud resource consumption, and identify changes in storage or infrastructure usage that may increase costs.
It also helps you understand cost ownership across different protection environments. By associating costs with individual Cohesity entities, you can determine which deployments or protection activities require greater infrastructure resources.
CloudSpend connects Cohesity resource information with cloud billing data across AWS, Azure, and GCP. This allows you to analyze data protection spending using Cohesity-specific entities even when the underlying cloud billing structures differ.
CloudSpend uses the configured Cohesity tags to associate cloud resources with their corresponding clusters, protection jobs, and policies. You can then analyze the resulting costs across accounts, subscriptions, projects, regions, services, and other available cloud dimensions.
This makes it easier to compare Cohesity spending across cloud environments and investigate differences in the cost of protecting workloads.
For example, changes in the number or frequency of protection jobs can affect the amount of cloud infrastructure required for backup operations. Similarly, changes in protection policies may influence the resources consumed by protected workloads. By examining the associated tags and cost trends, you can investigate these changes without manually correlating separate billing sources.
Cost trends and anomaly detection provide additional visibility into unusual spending patterns. You can also configure budgets and alerts to monitor Cohesity-related spending and identify when costs move beyond expected thresholds.
By associating cloud costs with Cohesity-specific resources, CloudSpend helps you understand how data protection activities affect overall cloud spending and where optimization may be appropriate.
CloudSpend uses the following entities to tag and track your Cohesity resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.
| Report category | Report display name | AWS/Azure tag key | GCP tag key | Tag value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cohesity | Cohesity Cluster ID | cohesity:cluster-id | cohesity-cluster-id | <cluster-id> |
| Cohesity | Cohesity Protection Job | cohesity:protection-job | cohesity-protection-job | <protection-job> |
| Cohesity | Cohesity Policy ID | cohesity:policy-id | cohesity-policy-id | <policy-id> |
These tagging entities allow CloudSpend to associate cloud costs with different components of your Cohesity data protection environment.
CloudSpend uses the above entities to tag and track your Cohesity resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. Each entity provides a different level of context for understanding how data protection resources contribute to cloud spending.
The Cohesity Cluster ID identifies the Cohesity cluster associated with the resource. CloudSpend uses cohesity:cluster-id in AWS and Azure and cohesity-cluster-id in GCP to associate cloud costs with the corresponding cluster. This provides a deployment-level view of spending and allows you to compare costs across Cohesity clusters.
The Cohesity Protection Job identifies a protection job responsible for protecting workloads. CloudSpend uses cohesity:protection-job in AWS and Azure, and cohesity-protection-job in GCP to associate cloud costs with the relevant protection activity. This allows you to examine spending based on individual protection operations and identify jobs associated with higher infrastructure consumption.
The Cohesity Policy ID identifies the policy associated with the protected workload. CloudSpend uses cohesity:policy-id in AWS and Azure, and cohesity-policy-id in GCP to group costs according to the relevant policy. This provides additional context when you compare the cost of different protection configurations.
You can use these entities together to investigate Cohesity spending at different levels. Cluster information provides a broader view of a deployment, while protection job and policy information help narrow the analysis to specific protection activities and configurations.
The separate AWS/Azure and GCP tag keys allow CloudSpend to identify the corresponding Cohesity resources across providers while retaining the tagging conventions used within each cloud environment.
Here are some of the key benefits of the Cohesity cost report:
With the Cohesity cost report, you get a consolidated view of spending associated with your Cohesity data protection environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
The report allows you to examine costs at different levels of the protection environment. Cluster-level analysis provides visibility into individual deployments, while protection job and policy information provides additional context about the activities and configurations contributing to those costs.
Follow these steps to view the report:
The Spend Analysis dashboard helps you examine Cohesity spending over time and understand which parts of your data protection environment are contributing to changes in cost.
You can review the total cost for the selected period and compare spending across accounts, subscriptions, projects, regions, or other available cloud dimensions. Cost trends help you identify sustained changes in spending as well as shorter periods where protection activity results in higher infrastructure consumption.
Service and resource-level analysis provides further context by showing which underlying cloud services contribute to Cohesity-related costs. This can help separate costs associated with data protection resources from other infrastructure services supporting the deployment.
The Cohesity tags allow you to investigate spending from the perspective of the protection environment. You can examine Cluster ID costs to compare deployments, use Protection Job to identify activities associated with higher spending, and analyze Policy ID to understand differences between protection configurations.
For example, if a protection job begins contributing significantly more to monthly spending, you can examine its associated resources and policy to determine whether the change corresponds to increased protection activity or a change in the underlying cloud resources.
Trend analysis and anomaly detection can help identify unusual cost behavior and provide an initial point for investigation. This allows you to move from a cost spike to the specific Cohesity resources associated with the change.
The Resource Explorer provides a detailed way to examine Cohesity-related costs across the different dimensions available in your cloud environment.
You can explore costs by accounts, subscriptions, projects, regions, services, resources, resource groups, and tags. This allows you to compare data protection spending across environments and narrow an investigation to a particular cluster or protection configuration.
Cohesity-specific tags provide additional context during this analysis. You can use the Cluster ID to examine costs associated with individual Cohesity deployments. The Protection Job tag allows you to investigate the infrastructure costs associated with specific protection activities, while the Policy ID helps you compare costs across different protection configurations.
You can apply filters to focus the analysis on specific clusters, protection jobs, policies, regions, or cloud environments. This is useful when investigating unexpected changes in protection costs or comparing similar Cohesity deployments.
Resource Explorer complements Spend Analysis by providing a more granular view of Cohesity cost attribution. It helps you understand how spending is distributed across protection resources and provides the details needed to investigate specific cost drivers and identify potential optimization opportunities.