F5 deployments play a crucial role in delivering applications by distributing traffic, maintaining high availability, and automatically scaling application delivery services based on demand. As organizations deploy F5 resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP, the associated cloud costs are incurred through the underlying infrastructure that powers these services, including compute, networking, and storage.
Understanding how these infrastructure costs relate to individual F5 deployments can be challenging, particularly when applications span multiple cloud accounts, regions, or providers. Since cloud billing data is generated by the cloud provider rather than F5 itself, identifying the cost associated with a specific application delivery deployment often requires additional context.
ManageEngine CloudSpend simplifies this process by using predefined F5 tags to identify related cloud resources and associate their costs with logical F5 deployments. By grouping billing data based on these tags, CloudSpend provides a unified view of F5-related cloud spending across AWS, Azure, and GCP, enabling you to understand where your application delivery costs originate and make informed optimization decisions.
F5 cost management is the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing cloud expenses associated with F5 application delivery resources such as clusters, device groups, and autoscale groups.
Instead of viewing cloud infrastructure costs independently, CloudSpend uses F5-specific tags applied to cloud resources to associate those costs with logical F5 deployments. This allows infrastructure costs generated by services such as virtual machines, networking, and storage to be analyzed from the perspective of F5 application delivery.
Effective F5 cost management involves:
CloudSpend simplifies F5 cost management across AWS, Azure, and GCP by connecting cloud billing data with tagged F5 resources.
Rather than manually identifying which cloud resources belong to a particular F5 deployment, CloudSpend discovers resources using predefined F5 tags such as Cluster, Device Group, and Autoscale Group. It then groups the associated cloud costs under these logical F5 entities, giving you a consolidated view of application delivery costs.
This tag-based approach enables you to:
Trend analysis and anomaly detection provide additional visibility into unexpected spending behavior. For example, if an autoscale group launches additional F5 instances during a sudden increase in application traffic, CloudSpend highlights the resulting cost increase so that it can be investigated promptly.
You can also configure budgets and alerts for tagged F5 deployments, enabling teams to monitor spending proactively and respond before costs exceed expected thresholds.
By organizing cloud billing data using F5-specific tags, CloudSpend transforms infrastructure costs into meaningful application delivery cost insights, making it easier to monitor usage, identify optimization opportunities, and control cloud spending.
CloudSpend uses the following entities to identify and track your F5 resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.
| Report category | Report display name | Description | Tag key | Tag value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F5 | Cluster ID | The F5 cluster ID. | f5:cluster | <cluster-id> |
| F5 | Device Group | The Device group | f5:device-group | <device-group> |
| F5 | Autoscale Group | The F5 autoscale group | f5:autoscale-group | <autoscale-group> |
These tags are used to group cloud costs and enable detailed cost analysis based on F5-related resource organization.
CloudSpend uses the entities cited in the table above to identify and track your F5 resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. These tags bridge cloud billing data with your F5 application delivery infrastructure, making it easier to understand how costs are distributed across different deployments.
The Cluster tag represents a logical group of F5 instances that work together to provide application availability, load balancing, and traffic management. CloudSpend uses this tag to attribute cloud costs to individual F5 clusters, enabling you to compare spending across deployments and identify clusters with higher infrastructure costs.
The Device Group tag represents a collection of F5 devices that share configuration and synchronize application delivery settings. CloudSpend uses this tag to aggregate costs for resources belonging to the same device group, helping you understand the cost of managing specific application environments and high availability configurations.
The Autoscale Group tag represents F5 resources that automatically scale based on application traffic and workload demand. CloudSpend uses this tag to monitor the cloud costs associated with dynamic scaling activities, making it easier to determine whether increased spending is caused by traffic growth or scaling policies.
By organizing cloud costs using these F5-specific tags, CloudSpend enables granular cost attribution across your application delivery infrastructure. You can analyze spending by cluster, device group, and autoscale group, compare deployment costs, identify high-cost environments, and optimize infrastructure utilization without manually correlating cloud billing data.
Here are some of the key benefits of the F5 cost report:
The F5 cost report provides a centralized view of cloud costs associated with your F5 deployments across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
By combining cloud billing information with F5-specific resource tags, the report helps you understand how infrastructure costs are distributed across clusters, device groups, and autoscaling deployments. This enables you to identify cost trends, compare deployments, and make informed decisions to optimize application delivery infrastructure.
Follow these steps to view the report:
1. Log in to CloudSpend and go to Reports.
2. Select the F5 cost report.
3. Use filters to narrow down by account, region, or resource.
4. Select the required account to view the Spend Analysis dashboard.
The Spend Analysisview provides a consolidated overview of the cloud costs associated with your F5 deployments across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It combines billing information with tagged F5 resources, allowing you to understand where your infrastructure budget is being consumed without manually analyzing cloud provider invoices.
From this view, you can monitor the total cloud cost for the selected time period, identify the highest spending cloud accounts, subscriptions, or projects, and detect anomalies that indicate unexpected cost increases.
You can also analyze cost distribution across services, regions, resource groups, and cloud accounts to understand how different infrastructure components contribute to overall spending. Trend analysis helps you compare costs over time and identify periods where application delivery infrastructure costs increased or decreased.
Since CloudSpend attributes costs using F5-specific tags, you can quickly determine whether changes in spending are associated with a particular cluster, device group, or autoscale group. This helps reduce the time required to investigate unexpected cloud costs and provides better visibility into application delivery infrastructure expenses.
The Resource Explorer provides a detailed view of how cloud costs are distributed across your F5 infrastructure. It enables you to analyze tagged resources from multiple perspectives, helping you identify cost drivers and improve infrastructure planning.
You can analyze cloud costs across accounts, subscriptions, projects, services, regions, resource groups, and tags, depending on the cloud provider. This flexibility allows you to understand cost ownership at different organizational levels while maintaining visibility into your F5 deployments.
The Resource Explorer also enables you to group costs using F5-specific tags such as Cluster, Device Group, and Autoscale Group. This makes it easier to attribute cloud spending to logical F5 deployments and evaluate the infrastructure cost of individual application delivery environments.
In addition, you can monitor total costs for a selected period, evaluate historical spending trends, and apply filters to focus on specific cloud providers, regions, services, or tagged deployments.
By allowing you to explore cost data across multiple dimensions, the Resource Explorer helps improve financial accountability, simplify cost analysis, and identify opportunities to optimize your F5 infrastructure while maintaining application performance and availability.