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Cost Dimensions and Virtual Tags

Published · Last updated: May 2026 · 2 min read

Who this is for

Team leads and finance stakeholders who want to attribute cloud costs to specific teams, projects, environments, or customers.

What you will complete

Understand what cost dimensions are, create virtual tags, and use them to break down costs by any dimension meaningful to your organization.

Before you begin

  • FinOps billing data must be connected and showing cost data.
  • Admin or Owner role required to manage dimensions.

What are cost dimensions?

Cost dimensions (also called virtual tags) are custom labels you create in CloudAIPilot to group and attribute cloud costs. Unlike native cloud provider tags (which require tagging resources in the provider console), virtual dimensions are defined entirely in CloudAIPilot and mapped to existing resources.

Example dimensions:

  • Team: Engineering, Marketing, Sales, DevOps
  • Environment: Production, Staging, Development
  • Project: Project-Alpha, Project-Beta, Customer-XYZ
  • Cost center: CC-001, CC-002

Step-by-step: create a cost dimension

  1. Go to FinOps.
  2. Click the Dimensions button or find the Allocations section and click Manage Dimensions.
  3. The Dimensions Manager dialog opens.
  4. Click Add Dimension.
  5. Enter a dimension name (e.g., "Team" or "Environment").
  6. Add values for the dimension (e.g., "Engineering", "Marketing", "DevOps").
  7. For each value, assign the servers or cloud accounts that belong to it.
  8. Save the dimension.

Using dimensions for cost allocation

Once dimensions are defined, the Allocations section on the FinOps dashboard shows cost broken down by each dimension value.

For example, with a "Team" dimension:

  • Engineering: $1,240 (45% of total)
  • Marketing: $680 (25%)
  • DevOps: $840 (30%)

This gives each team visibility into their cloud spend and enables internal chargeback.

Cost allocation with multiple dimensions

You can create multiple dimensions and filter the Allocations view by any combination. For example, view costs for the Engineering team in the Production environment only.

The Allocations card in the FinOps dashboard has selectors for which dimension to break down by.

What success looks like

  • The Allocations section shows cost totals per dimension value.
  • All costs are attributed to at least one dimension value (no "Untagged" remainder, or a minimal one).
  • Team or project leads can see their portion of total cloud spend.

Common errors and fixes

"Allocations shows a large 'Untagged' category" Cause: Some servers or cloud accounts are not assigned to any dimension value. Fix: Open Dimensions Manager and assign the untagged resources to the appropriate dimension values.

"Allocation percentages don't add up to 100%" Cause: Some resources are shared across multiple dimension values, or a resource is counted in multiple allocations. Fix: Review which resources are assigned to multiple values. Shared infrastructure costs can be split by percentage in the allocation settings.

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