# Rubrik cost report

Rubrik helps organizations protect business-critical workloads by simplifying backup, recovery, archival, and data life cycle management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As protected data grows across cloud providers, understanding how backup and archival activities contribute to cloud spending becomes increasingly important.

Although Rubrik manages data protection workflows, the associated cloud costs originate from the cloud infrastructure that stores, protects, and archives data. These costs include storage services, compute resources used during protection operations, networking, and long-term archive storage. As organizations expand their cloud footprint, attributing these costs to specific Rubrik deployments becomes more challenging.

CloudSpend provides a unified view of Rubrik-related cloud spending across [AWS](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/help/aws-integrate.html), [Azure](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/help/azure-integrate.html), and [GCP](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/help/gcp-integration.html) by identifying resources using predefined Rubrik tags. It associates cloud billing data with tagged Rubrik resources, enabling you to monitor backup and archival costs, analyze spending patterns, and optimize your cloud data protection environment.

## What is Rubrik cost management?

Rubrik cost management is the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing cloud expenses associated with Rubrik data protection resources.

CloudSpend uses Rubrik-specific tags applied to cloud resources to associate infrastructure costs with logical Rubrik deployments. This enables you to analyze cloud spending from the perspective of data protection activities rather than reviewing infrastructure costs independently.

Effective Rubrik cost management involves:

- Attributing cloud costs to Rubrik clusters, SLA domains, and archive locations.
- Monitoring spending trends across backup and archival environments.
- Identifying cost drivers, such as increasing protected data volumes, archive growth, or policy changes.
- Forecasting future cloud costs and configuring budgets to manage data protection spending proactively.

## How does CloudSpend manage Rubrik costs in a multi-cloud environment?

CloudSpend simplifies Rubrik cost management across AWS, Azure, and GCP by connecting cloud billing data with tagged Rubrik resources.  
Instead of manually identifying which cloud resources belong to individual protection environments, CloudSpend automatically discovers resources using predefined Rubrik tags and groups the associated cloud costs under logical Rubrik entities.

This enables you to:

- View Rubrik-related cloud costs in a unified report.
- Analyze spending by clusters, SLA domains, and archive locations.
- Compare costs across cloud providers, accounts, subscriptions, services, and regions.
- Understand how backup, archival, and recovery operations contribute to your overall cloud spend.

CloudSpend also distinguishes data protection costs from the underlying cloud infrastructure supporting backup and archival operations. This enables you to determine whether increased spending is driven by policy changes, archive growth, or infrastructure consumption.

Trend analysis and [anomaly detection](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/help/anomaly-report.html) help identify unexpected increases in cloud spending. For example, rapid archive growth or changes to SLA policies may result in higher storage costs. CloudSpend highlights these changes to support faster investigation.  
You can also [configure budgets and alerts](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/help/budget.html) for tagged Rubrik resources, allowing backup administrators and cloud operations teams to monitor cloud spending proactively and respond before costs exceed expected thresholds.

By organizing cloud billing data using Rubrik-specific tags, CloudSpend transforms infrastructure costs into meaningful data protection insights that support better planning, cost visibility, and cloud optimization.

## Rubrik tagging entities for cost allocation

CloudSpend uses the following entities to tag and track your Rubrik resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.

### AWS and Azure

| Report category | Report display name | Description | Tag key | Tag value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rubrik | Rubrik Cluster ID | The Rubrik cluster identifier. | rubrik:cluster-id | <cluster-id> |
| Rubrik | Rubrik SLA Domain | The Rubrik SLA domain. | rubrik:sla-domain | <sla-domain> |
| Rubrik | Rubrik Archive Location | The Rubrik archive location. | rubrik:archive-location | <archive-location> |

### GCP

| Report category | Report display name | Description | Tag key | Tag value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rubrik | Rubrik Cluster ID | The Rubrik cluster identifier. | rubrik-cluster-id | <cluster-id> |
| Rubrik | Rubrik SLA Domain | The Rubrik SLA domain. | rubrik-sla-domain | <sla-domain> |
| Rubrik | Rubrik Archive Location | The Rubrik archive location. | rubrik-archive-location | <archive-location> |

These tagging entities help organize cloud costs based on your Rubrik deployments, providing greater visibility into backup, archival, and recovery operations.

## How CloudSpend uses Rubrik tags for cost tracking

CloudSpend uses the above entities to tag and track your Rubrik resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. These entities help associate cloud billing data with your data protection deployments, making it easier to understand how cloud costs are distributed.

The *Rubrik Cluster ID* tag (rubrik:cluster-id) identifies a Rubrik cluster responsible for protecting workloads. CloudSpend uses this tag to associate cloud costs with individual clusters, allowing you to compare infrastructure costs across protection environments.

The *Rubrik SLA Domain* tag (rubrik:sla-domain) identifies the protection policy applied to workloads. CloudSpend uses this tag to associate cloud costs with SLA-driven backup and retention requirements, helping you understand how different protection policies influence cloud spending.

The *Rubrik Archive Location* tag (rubrik:archive-location) identifies the destination used for long-term archival. CloudSpend uses this tag to group cloud costs by archive location, enabling you to evaluate archive storage utilization and compare long-term retention costs across environments.

By organizing cloud costs using these Rubrik-specific tags, CloudSpend enables granular cost attribution across your data protection environment. You can compare costs by cluster, SLA domain, and archive location, identify high-cost protection workloads, and optimize backup and archival strategies based on usage patterns.

This structured tagging approach improves cost visibility, strengthens ownership across protection environments, and supports informed decisions to optimize cloud spending.

## Benefits of the Rubrik cost report

The Rubrik cost report helps you understand how your data protection environment contributes to cloud spending by organizing infrastructure costs using Rubrik-specific tags.

Some of the key benefits include:

- Provides a consolidated view of Rubrik-related cloud costs across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Maps infrastructure costs to Rubrik clusters, SLA domains, and archive locations.
- Enables detailed cost analysis across backup and archival operations.
- Helps identify protection environments with higher operational costs.
- Improves visibility into archive growth and retention costs.
- Supports proactive cost management through budgets, alerts, and trend analysis.
- Enables informed decisions for backup optimization, archive planning, and long-term cost control.

## Interpreting the Rubrik cost report

The Rubrik cost report provides a centralized view of your Rubrik-related cloud spending across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. By associating cloud billing data with tagged Rubrik resources, the report helps you understand how backup, archival, and recovery operations contribute to your overall cloud costs.

Follow these steps to view the report:

1. Log in to **CloudSpend** and go to **Reports**.
2. Select the **Rubrik cost report**.
3. Use filters to narrow down by account, region, or resource.
4. Select the required account to view the *Spend Analysis* dashboard.

## Spend Analysis in the Rubrik cost report

The *Spend Analysis* view helps you understand how your Rubrik environment contributes to cloud spending over time. By combining cloud billing data with tagged Rubrik resources, it provides detailed visibility into the costs associated with protecting, retaining, and archiving data across your multi-cloud environment.

From this view, you can monitor the total cloud cost for a selected time period, identify the highest-spending cloud accounts or subscriptions, and detect anomalies that may indicate unexpected changes in protection workloads or archive storage consumption. Historical trend analysis helps you understand how cloud costs evolve as data volumes increase, retention requirements change, or additional workloads are brought under protection.

You can further analyze cloud costs across services, regions, and resource groups to understand how the underlying infrastructure supporting your Rubrik deployments contributes to overall spending. This helps distinguish data protection costs from compute, networking, and storage services that support backup and recovery operations.

Because cloud costs are organized using Rubrik-specific tags, Spend Analysis enables you to evaluate spending by Cluster ID, SLA Domain, and Archive Location. For example, you can identify whether stricter SLA policies are increasing storage consumption, determine which archive locations contribute the most to long-term storage costs, or compare protection costs across multiple Rubrik clusters.

These insights help backup administrators and cloud operations teams optimize protection policies, evaluate archive strategies, and balance recovery requirements with cloud cost efficiency.

## Resource Explorer in the Rubrik cost report

The *Resource Explorer* provides a flexible way to analyze cloud costs associated with your Rubrik resources across multiple operational dimensions.

You can group and filter cloud costs by accounts, subscriptions, projects, regions, services, resource groups, and tags to better understand how data protection resources are distributed throughout your cloud environment. This enables you to investigate individual protection environments or compare costs across different backup and archival deployments.

Grouping cloud costs using Rubrik tags provides deeper visibility into your protection architecture. You can analyze costs by Cluster ID to compare protection environments, use the SLA Domain tag to evaluate the cost impact of different protection and retention policies, and use the Archive Location tag to understand long-term archive storage utilization across cloud providers.

Resource Explorer also helps identify environments with higher infrastructure costs, making it easier to investigate archive growth, policy-driven storage consumption, and long-term retention expenses. Combined with filtering capabilities, you can isolate specific protection environments, cloud regions, or tagged resources to perform more focused cost analysis.

By organizing cloud costs around Rubrik resources, Resource Explorer improves cost visibility across your data protection environment, strengthens ownership of cloud resources, and supports informed decisions for archive optimization, policy management, and long-term cost planning.