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Enterprise

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Overview

Chargeback shows Kafka costs across five axes — storage, partitions, ingress, egress and Kafka Connect — and lets you group those costs by cluster, application or label. Each row supports drill-down into topics, service accounts and connectors. For background on the cost axes and the metrics available per cluster type, see Chargeback concepts.
From our blog: Chargeback: attribute and map Kafka costs to your business Practical strategies to tag, trace, and report Kafka spending by team and application.

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Set up Chargeback

The first time an administrator opens the Chargeback page, an onboarding wizard runs through two steps:
1

Set cost rates

For each cluster, enter the unit costs that match your provider pricing or internal infrastructure model:Each value supports up to eight decimal places, with a maximum of 9.99999999. Leaving ingress, egress or connector task hour empty is the same as 0.The connector task hour cost is the default rate applied to every Kafka Connect connector task on the cluster. To charge different rates per connector type, add a per-connector-class override (for example, a higher rate for an S3 sink connector than for a JDBC source connector). An override takes precedence over the default for connectors of that class.
2

Select Chargeback Labels

Pick the label keys you want to group costs by (for example, team, cost-center, env).Only labels currently attached to topics or service accounts are offered. Conduktor-defined labels (the conduktor.io/* namespace) are excluded.You can skip this step and add Chargeback Labels later from the settings drawer.
After both steps are saved, Console begins applying these rates to the metrics already collected.

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View costs

Use the filter bar at the top of the page to control what’s displayed. The chart at the top shows the totals for the active view across the selected period. The table below lists each entity with its measured value, calculated cost and percentage of the total.

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Drill into topics and service accounts

Each row in the Cluster, Application Instance and Label views can be expanded to show the topics, service accounts and connectors that contributed to it.
  • Topics: storage, partitions, ingress and egress per topic
  • Service accounts: ingress and egress per service account
  • Connectors: connect cost per connector, grouped by Kafka Connect cluster, with the connector class shown
Service account drill-downs depend on the cluster type, and connector drill-downs require the cluster to have Kafka Connect configured. See the cluster-type capability matrix in Chargeback concepts.

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How metrics are calculated

Metrics are stored as raw counters and costs are computed at query time. Updating a unit cost takes effect immediately across all historical periods.
1,073,741,824 is one GB in bytes (1024³). byte_hours accumulates from periodic snapshots: each snapshot multiplies the topic’s current retained bytes by the snapshot interval expressed in hours.
The accuracy of storage and partition metrics depends on the snapshot frequency. A shorter interval captures more granular usage; a longer interval may miss short-lived spikes.Deleting a cluster removes its Chargeback metrics.

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Update cost rates and labels

Click the settings (cog) icon at the top right of the Chargeback page to open the settings drawer:
  • General tab: edit cost rates per cluster, or add a new cluster row
  • Chargeback Labels tab: add or remove the label keys eligible for grouping
Both tabs save independently.

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Export data

Click Export in the filter bar to download the current view as a CSV. The export reflects the active View by, Show selections, Period and Search, so only data matching your current view is included. The default file name is Chargeback_<startDate>_<endDate>_<view>.csv. The granularity of the exported series matches the selected period: 7D and 30D split by day, 6M, 12M and YTD split by month.

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Permissions

Console shows cost attribution for all clusters regardless of the cluster-level permissions assigned to the user.