Structure your OCI organization into groups for cost optimization and reporting

In this post, we show you how to organize your tenancies into groups for simpler cost management and optimize costs for each of your groups.

In the first post of the series, we discussed the basics of organizations, where we understood how to scale your organization and manage costs across several tenancies. In the second blog, we discussed the power of governance rules as a tool to set enforcements across your tenancies. If you missed it, you can go back and check them out.

Using tags for better organization

As you scale your organization, you might want to start clustering your tenancies into logical groupings, so it's easy to understand which team owns them. Let's start with an example like the following image, where I grouped a few tenancies by cost center. With this grouping, I can easily understand which group the tenancies belong to. After you create these groups, you can also use them within your cost management suite of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services, such as Cost Analysis, Budgets, and Cloud Advisor.

Governance rules enable you to push a tag down to each tenancy and set a tag default so that all resources within the tenancy get a tag applied. Setting a tag default ensures that you have comprehensive tag coverage for all resources within the organization so that resource managers can track and account for each resource and its cost. To set a tag default, create the governance rule and target each tenancy with the tag default. This action not only pushes the tag to each tenancy but also locks it so that the tag remains consistent across the organization. For comprehensive tagging, follow this step for each tenancy within the organization.

The default value is A, which means that tenancies with this governance rule have their resources tagged with CostCenter:A (key:value pair). You can also tag tenancies when you create this governance rule.

The default value is A, which means that tenancies with this governance rule have their resources tagged with CostCenter:A (key:value pair). You can also tag tenancies when you create this governance rule.

For newly created tenancies, you can apply this governance rule so, right from the start, the tag and default are set to a child tenancy.

Because these logical groupings are based on tags, you can use them throughout OCI, including in Cost Analysis, Budgets, and Cloud Advisor.

Cloud Advisor

We recently added support for Cloud Advisor and organizations. Now, you can centrally view all recommendations across your entire organization as the parent tenancy in a single dashboard. With this capability, you can report on the efficiencies of each of your tenancies, including identifying any cost savings opportunities.

Go to Cloud Advisor in the parent tenancy. By default, you view recommendations across the organization. You can also filter by a specific tenancy to home in on their specific recommendations.

This section also includes the recommendations pages, where you can find recommendations across multiple services for categories like cost savings, performance, and high availability.

On the parent tenancy, you can view recommendations but can’t implement those recommendations. If you want to modify the resource, log in to the child tenancy and edit any child tenancy resources.

Conclusion

We’re excited to launch these new features to help you on your cloud journey. Your opinion matters to us, so send us a message if you have any ideas. For more information, see the following resources:

• Use organizations to centrally manage costs: Part 1 of 3
• Govern your OCI organization with governance rules: Part 2 of 3
• Organizations documentation
• Organizations demo video

Originally appeared on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Blog.

Author: Tim Tam, Principal Product Manager