Charge Types and the Full Picture of a Bill

Beyond the Obvious Usage Charges

Not every line in a cloud bill represents compute or storage you consumed. FOCUS defines a ChargeType column that categorizes why a charge appears. Understanding charge types is essential for accurate cost analysis — if you sum all costs without filtering by charge type, you will double-count.

The key FOCUS ChargeType values are:

Why This Matters for Queries

If you want to know "how much did we spend on actual resource usage?", you must filter to ChargeType = 'Usage'. If you include Purchase charges, you will count Reserved Instance purchases in the month they were bought AND count the amortized EffectiveCost of those same reservations — double-counting the spend.

-- Correct: Only actual resource consumption
SELECT SUM(EffectiveCost)
FROM focus_billing_data
WHERE ChargeType = 'Usage'
  AND ChargePeriodStart >= '2024-01-01'

-- Wrong: Includes RI purchases AND their amortized cost
SELECT SUM(EffectiveCost)
FROM focus_billing_data
WHERE ChargePeriodStart >= '2024-01-01'

The Commitment Coverage Columns

FOCUS also defines columns to track how usage is covered by commitments:

• CommitmentDiscountId: The ID of the Savings Plan or Reserved Instance covering this usage line.
• CommitmentDiscountType: Whether it is a Reserved, Savings Plan, or Spot discount.
• CommitmentDiscountStatus: Whether the commitment is Used (covering actual usage) or Unused (you paid for capacity you did not use — waste).

Filtering for CommitmentDiscountStatus = 'Unused' immediately surfaces wasted reservation spend — one of the highest-value FinOps optimizations.