Cost centers
A cost center is a managed FinOps allocation target with a unique code, a
display name, an optional owner, and an optional parent cost center. Cost
centers are first-class records: they are not request tags and are not created
from x-zeallm-tags.
Use cost centers when finance needs a stable owner for budget enforcement, analytics, statements, or chargeback. Continue to use tags for caller-supplied labels such as experiments or features.
Direct assignment and inheritance
Platform admins can directly assign one active cost center to an organization, team, application, or user. For a request made with a virtual key, the gateway selects the first direct assignment in this order:
For example, an application's direct assignment overrides its team's assignment. If the application has no assignment, the team assignment is used; if neither has one, the organization is checked before the key owner. With no assignment at any level, the request has no cost-center attribution.
Removing a direct assignment makes that subject inherit again when an
applicable parent or user assignment exists. A cost center's optional
parent describes the finance hierarchy; it does not change request-time
precedence.
Historical attribution
The effective cost center ID is written to each SpendLog record. Managed
FinOps metadata resolved for the request is stored separately in the record's
dimension snapshot. Changing an assignment affects later requests; it does not
rewrite existing spend records.
Cost events also carry their cost-center ID and dimension snapshot. This keeps request, agent, tool, infrastructure, and adjustment costs attributable using the values recorded when each event was ingested.
Budgets and reporting
A budget can use a cost center as its enforcement scope. When a request resolves to that cost center, its active cost-center budgets are checked alongside the other applicable budgets. A budget on another scope can also carry a cost center as accounting metadata; that association does not make it a cost-center-scoped budget.
FinOps Analytics can filter and group recorded spend by cost center. Chargeback can close a period into statements grouped by cost center, after rate-card and allocation-policy processing. See Cost centers, Budgets, and Chargeback and showback.
For the complete entity and SpendLog flow, see FinOps relationship and data flow.