Skip to content

Enhancing Namespace Chargeback Reports with Custom Label-Based Metadata in Rafay

In the world of FinOps, precise cost allocation is more than just a “nice to have”, it’s the foundation for accurate chargeback, accountability, and informed decision-making. With Rafay’s latest release, Chargeback Summary Reports aggregated by namespace now support custom label-based metadata enrichment.

This enhancement empowers FinOps teams to add business-relevant metadata (like team or cost_center) directly into their cost reports making it easier to trace expenses to the right owners and justify resource consumption.

Why This Matters for FinOps

In large, multi-tenant Kubernetes environments, namespaces often represent workloads owned by different teams, applications, or business units. Without enriched metadata, a FinOps practitioner might see “Namespace A” incurring costs, but need extra steps to figure out which team or cost center is responsible.

Now, you can define specific label keys (e.g., team, cost_center) in the chargeback report configuration, and Rafay will automatically include them as additional columns in the report—populated with values from the namespace labels. This directly embeds organizational context into your cost visibility.

Note:
This enhancement applies to namespace-based aggregation in chargeback reports (not namespace-label-based aggregation). This is because if a primary label value (e.g., cost_center) is the same across multiple namespaces but secondary label values (e.g., team) differ, the report will not be able to aggregate on primary labels in such cases.

Implementing This in Rafay

The process is straightforward. Below is an example using RCTL (though API interface is also available for automation). We have added labels to both system namespaces and namespaces belonging to application teams to begin with.

Labels

Step 1: Create a Chargeback Group with Additional Labels

apiVersion: system.k8smgmt.io/v3
kind: ChargebackGroup
metadata:
  annotations:
    additionalNSLabels: "team,cost-center"
  name: chargeback-demo
spec:
  aggregate:
    namespace: true
  inclusions:
    - project: '*'
  type: summary

./rctl apply -f chargeback_group.yaml

Step 2: Generate the Chargeback Report

apiVersion: system.k8smgmt.io/v3
kind: ChargebackGroupReport
metadata:
  name: chargeback-demo
spec:
  groupName: chargeback-demo
  startDate:
    seconds: 1754438400
  endDate:
    seconds: 1754803200

./rctl create chargebackgroupreport -f chargeback_report.yaml --download

Your generated report will now include two new columns, "team" and "cost_center" with values pulled from namespace labels. This gives FinOps teams instant insight into who is driving costs and where they should be allocated.

Report

Summary

This new capability transforms namespace chargeback into a business-aligned cost reporting system helping FinOps teams:

  • Improve cost transparency
  • Simplify internal chargeback processes
  • Enable better cost optimization conversations with stakeholders

With Rafay, you can align Kubernetes cost reporting directly with your organization’s financial and operational structure so that no manual reconciliation is required.