The Colony Cost Dashboard provides actionable, real-time insights into your cloud provider costs per Colony Environment, including actual costs and calculated estimates.

Once you enable the feature in your Colony account, we begin collecting the data from your cloud providers and run a tally of your costs. It takes 24-48 hours for the information to aggregate and the values to show in the Cost Dashboard. The onboarding process is different per provider.

Setting up the Dashboard via AWS

To enable billing retrieval via the IAM user:

1. In AWS, login as your root user.
2. In the top toolbar, click your username and then select My Account.
3. Select the IAM User & Role Access to Billing Information checkbox.

To verify your IAM user has access to Billing:

1. In AWS, login as your root user.
2. In the top toolbar, select Services. 
3. Search for Billing and select it from the result list.
   The Billing and Cost Management Dashboard displays.

If you do not have access to the dashboard, follow these steps:

1. In AWS, login as your root user.
2. From the top toolbar, select Services.
3. Select IAM.
4. From the left toolbar, select Users and select the IAM user requiring the service permission.
5. Select Add Permissions.
6. Select Attach existing policies directly.
7. Search for PowerUserAccess and Add the policy to the IAM user.

To configure Colony’s Cost Allocation Tags:

NOTE: In order to see the tags noted in the steps below, first launch a sandbox via Colony.

1. In AWS, login as the IAM user role name.
2. In the top toolbar, select Services.
3. Search for Billing and select it from the result list. This was enabled during the previous steps.
4. Select Cost Allocation Tags.
5. Search for the following tags: colony-blueprint-name, colony-cloud-account-id, colony-environment-id.
6. Select the box to the left of each tag and select Activate.

NOTE: Colony will begin to pull the data via the API and aggregate the information. Learn more about AWS User-Defined Costs. 

To validate the setup:

1. Wait at least 24 hours after configuration and then log in to your CloudShell Colony account.
2. Select Cost to see your values. The data will show you the costs for the last 24 hours.
3. If there are any errors, begin troubleshooting this procedure.

Setting up the Dashboard via Azure 

To setup cost tracking in your Azure account:

1. Log in to your Azure account.
2. Select Subscriptions and open the subscription that CloudShell Colony is using.
3. Select Cost analysis from the subscription menu.
4. Make sure you can see cost information. If not, contact Azure's support and configure your access to cost information.
5. Wait at least 24 hours after configuration and then log in to your CloudShell Colony account.
6. Select Cost to see your values. The data will show you the costs for the last 24 hours.
7. If there are any errors, begin troubleshooting this procedure.