Rule-Based Dimensions
Rule-based dimensions, available via the Flexera Rule-Based Dimensions API, are flexible, user-defined dimensions you can use to view your organization’s cost data categorized in groups that fit your particular business needs. With rule-based dimensions, you can automatically group costs to a business unit, department, product, project or any other dimension, and you can combine rules to meaningful categories for cost reporting and analysis.
Note:For more information about rule-based dimensions, see the Rule-Based Dimensions API on the Bill Analysis, Bill Adjustment, Budget, and Rule-Based Dimensions APIs webpage.
Users can apply rule-based dimensions on the Cloud Dashboards and the Billing Center Tabular View to look at their costs from meaningful new perspectives and provide new insights important to their business.
The following sections provide more information about the uses and limitations of rule-based dimensions:
Flexera One Role Prerequisite
Important:The Manage rule-based dimensions role is required to create and modify rule-based dimensions. For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.
Uses for Rule-Based Dimensions
Some potential uses for rule-based dimensions to consider include the following:
For example, a common use case for rule-based dimensions is to create a Department or Environment dimension and define rules to map known account values to your organization’s departments or environments.
Rules Can Change Over Time
The rules for a rule-based dimension can change over time. For example, you could define a fresh rule list for each calendar month. Use the dated_rules field to set the effective_at date for each rule list for which you want to maintain a historical view of cloud spending.
Billing Center Support
Rule-based dimensions are powerful for slicing data across multiple dimensions. They can be used instead of billing centers. However, Billing Centers are still useful when you need to restrict or permit access to different sets of cost data.
Rule-based dimensions provide the potential for more flexibility and granularity compared to billing center allocations.
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The rules in rule-based dimensions can refer to other rule-based dimensions, custom tag dimensions, and most other built-in dimensions (like account, vendor, and resource group). Refer to the rule-based dimensions API documentation for a full list of dimensions that can be used. Other dimensions are not allowed. |
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As described earlier, rules can change over time. This allows for a different billing center allocation rule list for each month. |
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Costs can be assigned to billing centers in the bottom of the hierarchy, and they will automatically “trickle up” the billing center hierarchy. This dynamic is much simpler to manage than micro-managing multiple allocation tables. |
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Recommendations can also be assigned to billing centers using rule-based dimensions for allocation. However, recommendations have only two fields available for rules to match: vendor_account and resource_group. |
Using rule-based dimensions this way would supersede billing center allocation rules—essentially overwriting its results.
Your organization may have existing billing center allocation rules. If you choose to leverage billing center-style rule-based dimensions in place of billing center allocation rules, the rule-based dimensions would take precedence over billing center allocations starting from the month identified as the rule-based dimensions effective_at date.
Limitations
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Rules are case-sensitive. |
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The vendor_account_name dimension cannot be used in rule-based dimensions. Instead, find the ID number of the account and use the vendor_account dimension. |