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What Are Unit Costs and Business Metrics?

  • Unit Costs
  • Business Metrics
A unit cost is any metric that your business tracks, like users, requests, transactions, or customers. In Vantage, you can add unit costs as a visualization on Cost Reports to visualize your cloud infrastructure costs on a per unit basis.

Why Should I Use Them?

Most organizations already have key performance indicators, or KPIs, as a part of their company’s goals. They help to measure efficiency and provide a better context for why you may be experiencing cost spikes. For example, some spikes may be justified based on adding a new user or increasing your customer base. Tracking per unit costs helps to provide some details as to why costs are changing.

Business Metrics Use Cases

  • Financial Analyst
  • DevOps Engineer
You are a financial analyst at a SaaS company and use unit costs and business metrics to understand the cost per daily active user (DAU). By visualizing cloud infrastructure costs on a per unit basis, you can determine how changes in user activity impact overall costs. For example, if there’s a spike in costs, you can correlate it with an increase in DAUs, justifying the expenditure and helping the company plan budgets more accurately.

Lesson 1: Understand Unit Costs and Business Metrics

Lesson 2: Create Business Metrics

Additional Resources