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FinOps relationship and data flow

This guide connects the records administrators configure with the data users see in Dashboard, FinOps Analytics, chargeback, and governance workflows.

Business and runtime relationships​

  • Organizations, teams, and applications describe where a workload belongs. A team belongs to an organization, and an application belongs to a team.
  • A user owns keys and can also be an organization or team member. The key determines the request's user, team, application, and organization context.
  • A managed cost center is a finance allocation target assigned directly to an organization, team, application, or user. The gateway resolves one effective value using Application → Team → Organization → User.
  • Tags are labels supplied by a key or request. They are many-valued and do not participate in cost-center inheritance.
  • A customer identifies the tenant or end user behind a calling application. It is independent of the portal user who owns the key.
  • Agents, runs, tools, and tool calls add non-request and composite AI costs. They carry scope and attribution into cost events.

These axes coexist. One request can belong to an organization, team, application, user, customer, one effective cost center, and several tags at the same time.

Request-to-report data flow​

The gateway checks every applicable budget, not just the nearest tenant budget. Applicable scopes can include key, user, team, organization, application, managed tag, customer, effective cost center, agent, and tool. Blocking enforcement stops the call before provider tokens are spent; monitoring and warning enforcement allows it.

After an allowed response, the gateway writes a SpendLog asynchronously. It contains request facts such as model, provider, token classes, latency, status, provider/billed cost, tenant IDs, customer, tags, agent IDs, and the effective cost-center ID. Governed FinOps values are retained in the dimensionSnapshot. Assignment changes therefore affect future traffic and do not relabel historical records.

Agent, tool, API, compute, storage, network, and adjustment costs are represented as cost events. Cost events use the same core scope fields and a dimension snapshot, which lets finance combine model and non-model costs.

FinOps Analytics, showback, and chargeback​

  • Dashboard answers “what changed recently?” with a fixed, quick overview.
  • FinOps Analytics answers “where did usage, failures, tokens, and cost come from?” using shared time and attribution filters.
  • Request Logs supplies the individual request evidence behind FinOps Analytics.
  • Showback publishes attributable consumption without necessarily billing the recipient.
  • Chargeback applies rate cards and shared-cost allocation, then closes an explicit accounting period into snapshotted statements.
  • Invoice reconciliation compares entered provider invoice totals with metered provider cost. Accounting periods are not created automatically.

Governance loop​

Budget thresholds and enforcement provide the automatic control plane. Spend-governance policies add human approval for budget increases, high-cost models, high-cost agents, and emergency overrides. Optimization recommendations are proposals backed by evidence; a cheaper model recommendation is not proof of equivalent quality.

Where to work​

  • Dashboard (/dashboard) — recent health and shortcuts.
  • FinOps Analytics (/usage) — trends, rankings, attribution, exports, and request drill-through.
  • Cost Centers (/cost-centers) — managed finance targets and assignments.
  • Budgets (/budgets) — first-class limits, thresholds, and enforcement.
  • FinOps Attribution (/finops/attribution) — custom dimensions, assignments, and required-metadata policy.
  • Cost Events (/finops/cost-events) — non-model and composite cost evidence.
  • Agent FinOps (/agent-finops) — agents, runs, priced tools, and tool calls.
  • Chargeback (/chargeback-showback) — rate cards, allocations, statements, and invoice reconciliation.
  • Spend Governance (/governance-approvals) — policies, requests, decisions, and emergency overrides.
  • Tokenomics → Platform recommendations (/tokenomics/recommendations) — evidence-backed administrative recommendations. Existing /optimization links redirect here.

See Dashboard and FinOps Analytics for access, scope, and investigation workflows.