Cost Optimization

Quazzar Space provides cost tracking and estimation across all your cloud providers. This guide covers how to monitor spending, set budgets, generate reports, and reduce costs.

Cost Tracking Overview

The platform tracks costs at every level of your infrastructure hierarchy:

• Project level — Total monthly and annual spending across all environments
• Environment level — Cost breakdown per deployment stage
• Server level — Individual resource costs based on provider pricing
• Service level — Aggregated cost per application, factoring in the servers it runs on

Cost data updates automatically as you add or modify infrastructure resources.

Feature Availability by Plan

Enabling Cost Calculation

To get automatic cost estimates for your infrastructure:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings
2. Under Cost Estimation, toggle the feature on
3. Ensure your servers have complete metadata — provider, region, instance type, and resource specs

For the most accurate estimates, connect your cloud provider accounts through the Integrations page. This allows Quazzar Space to pull real pricing data specific to your account.

Tagging for Cost Attribution

Add tags to your servers and services to create custom cost allocation views. Useful tags include:

• team — Which team owns the resource
• cost-center — Department or budget code
• purpose — Production workload, development, CI/CD, etc.

You can then filter cost reports by any tag to see spending per team, department, or function.

Cost Reports

Navigate to your project or environment and open the Cost Reports section to access detailed breakdowns.

Available Breakdowns

• By environment — Compare spending across production, staging, and development
• By provider — See distribution across AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, OVH, and DigitalOcean
• By region — Identify geographic cost concentrations
• By service — Find which applications consume the most budget
• By tag — Custom groupings based on your tagging strategy

Visualizations

Cost reports include several chart types:

• Bar charts — Compare costs across environments, providers, or services
• Pie charts — See proportional spending distribution
• Monthly trends — Track spending over time and spot anomalies

Exporting Reports

Export your cost data for use in external tools or financial reporting:

• CSV — Raw data for spreadsheets and analysis tools
• PDF — Formatted reports for stakeholders and management reviews

To export, open any cost report view and click the Export button in the top-right corner.

Cost Budgets and Alerts

Set spending limits to avoid unexpected bills:

1. Navigate to Projects > [Your Project] > Settings > Budget
2. Set a monthly budget amount for the project or a specific environment
3. Configure alert thresholds (for example, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of budget)
4. Choose notification channels — email, Slack, or other configured integrations

When spending crosses a threshold, you receive an alert through the selected channels. This helps catch runaway costs before they become a problem.

Optimization Strategies

Right-Sizing Resources

Identify over-provisioned resources by comparing actual usage against allocated capacity:

1. Enable monitoring for your servers (see the Monitoring guide)
2. Review resource utilization data — CPU, memory, and disk usage over time
3. Identify servers consistently running below 30% utilization
4. Resize to a smaller instance type that still meets performance requirements

Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

For predictable workloads, committed-use pricing offers significant savings:

Spot and Preemptible Instances

For fault-tolerant workloads like batch processing, CI/CD runners, and development environments, spot instances can reduce costs by 60-90%. Keep in mind these instances can be reclaimed by the provider with short notice, so they are best suited for workloads that can tolerate interruption.

Multi-Cloud Cost Comparison

On Team plans and above, Quazzar Space supports multiple cloud providers within a single project. Use this to compare pricing across providers for equivalent workloads and choose the most cost-effective option for each service.

AI-Powered Recommendations

On Business plans and above, the platform provides AI-driven cost optimization suggestions based on your infrastructure patterns. These recommendations may include:

• Instance type changes for better price-performance ratio
• Identification of idle or underutilized resources
• Suggestions for reserved capacity based on usage patterns
• Architecture-level optimizations for cost efficiency

Best Practices for Reducing Multi-Cloud Spending

1. Audit regularly — Review cost reports monthly to catch unexpected increases early
2. Tag everything — Consistent tagging makes it easy to identify where money is going
3. Separate environments — Keep non-production environments on smaller instance types
4. Set budgets early — Configure alerts before costs become a problem, not after
5. Leverage committed pricing — Move stable production workloads to reserved instances
6. Clean up unused resources — Regularly check for orphaned servers, unused storage, and idle load balancers
7. Use the service map — Understand dependencies before decommissioning resources

Next Steps

• Infrastructure Management — Organize your infrastructure for better cost visibility
• Monitoring & Alerts — Utilization data helps inform right-sizing decisions