Cost centers
Group BigQuery spend by department, product or business unit with ordered match rules, give each group a monthly budget, then filter the dashboard and Usage by them.
A cost center is a named group of spend — a department, product or business unit. You define it with rules. SlashPeak tags every job and table with the first cost center whose rules match. Anything that matches none is Unallocated.
Cost centers group spend. They are not the people on your account: those are in Settings → Team (see Teams, roles, and settings).
Create cost centers
Owners open Settings → Cost centers.
- Add a cost center and give it a name and a colour. You can also give it a Monthly budget.
- Add one or more rules. A rule matches one field:
| Field | Applies to | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Project | jobs and tables | acme-analytics-prod |
| Dataset | jobs and tables | marketing |
| Label | jobs and tables (a table also uses its dataset's labels) | team = growth |
| User | jobs | [email protected] |
| Job source | jobs | dbt, looker, scheduled_query |
| dbt project | jobs | jaffle_shop |
Each rule compares with equals, starts with or regex. A rule can target jobs, tables, or both.
- Click Preview to see the last 30 days of compute spend per cost center before you save.
- Click Save.
A center matches when any of its rules match. Order matters: the list is checked top to bottom and the first match wins, so put the most specific cost center first. Use Move up / Move down to reorder.
If your jobs already carry labels, the tab suggests starter cost centers from the label key with the most spend.
Monthly budgets
Each cost center can have a monthly budget in US dollars. Leave it empty for no budget.
- The budget is for the cost center's compute spend in each calendar month, in your account's time zone. Storage is not included.
- On the dashboard, pick the cost center in the picker. The Commit used tile becomes Budget used: spend so far this month against the budget, and the month-end forecast. With no budget, the tile shows Set a budget (owners) and how this month is pacing against last month. Unallocated never has a budget.
- Budget alerts warn you when a cost center's forecast crosses a threshold of its budget. They use the same thresholds and channels as the commit alerts.
- When you change a budget, its alerts start again against the new amount.
When tags update
- On Save, every job and table in the scan window is re-tagged right away.
- Every scan tags its new jobs and tables.
Viewers can see cost centers but cannot change them.
Where to use them
- Dashboard → Executive Summary — a cost center picker filters the whole page. The By cost center tab shows daily spend per cost center.
- Usage — the Cost center filter on every tab. Pick several, including Unallocated.
Limits
- Up to 50 cost centers per connection and 20 rules per cost center.
- The daily spend chart under a cost center shows compute only. Storage has no per-job owner, so a cost center's storage shows as its current size, not a trend.
- Job dataset is the write destination, or the first table read when the destination is a temporary result table.