Expose the standard_factor field from the ci_cost_settings table in the UI.

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Overview

We have heard from many customers that effectively managing CI compute costs is a critical problem. One common challenge is how to allocate the costs of running CI/CD jobs on instance runners to various business lines, departments, or cost centers.

Today, we offer the Runner Fleet dashboard at the Admin and Group Levels, which includes the runner usage by groups/projects exported as a CSV feature. This is a good enough option for some customers to address the question, "which of my lines of business, teams, or organizations drove increased spending and usage?" In other words, we solve the problem of cost allocation—show back, which is the reporting of usage incurred by a specific business unit.

Other customers seek enhanced capabilities, enabling them to implement cost allocation easily via a chargeback model, which is "an actual charge to via accounting systems based on defined categories."

To support a chargeback model, in at least one instance, we have had customers request that we expose to an interface that enables customer admins to set cost factors for various runner types, similar to the model used on GitLab-hosted runners.

Proposal: 2024-11-20

• In the Fleet Visibility team call @pedropombeiro proposed simply exposing the standard_factor field from the ci_cost_settings table in the UI.

• The standard_factor field will be a user editable value and therefore this can be used to set the cost value for chargebacks.

With that approach, if we decide in the future to build out capabilities for cost factor management that customers can use, then at least we have started with the same data structures.

Proposal - old

This proposal is positioned as a boring, initial solution to the more intensive requirement.

Add a field to the runner data model titled runner_chargeback_rate. This field is a user-editable field that can store values in decimal format.

Example data model for ci_runners

id	description	ip_address	active	paused	is_shared	runner_type	name	online	status	runner_chargeback_rate
16	null	null	true	false	true	instance_type	null	true	online	0.01
17	null	null	true	false	true	instance_type	null	true	online	0.03

Example data report - Compute minutes used by instance runners (CSV -> spreadsheet)

Project path	Usage (min)	charge_back_value	compute_cost (charge_back_value x usage)
Software Eng Group / Merge trains	3460	0.03	103.80
SRE group / Project Phoenix	594	0.02	59.40

Technical implementation details

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