Glossary
Key terms used throughout the CLARITY platform and documentation.
General
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| FinOps | Cloud financial management — the practice of bringing financial accountability to cloud spending through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. |
| Provider | A cloud platform: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). |
| Credential | Encrypted cloud account access information stored in CLARITY. Used to authenticate with provider APIs for data collection. |
| Sync | The automatic process of collecting cost data, resource inventories, metrics, and recommendations from cloud provider APIs. |
| Tier | A subscription level that controls which CLARITY features are available to your organization. |
Cost Terminology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| MTD | Month-to-date. The cumulative cost from the first day of the current month through today. |
| Waste Ratio | The percentage of total cloud spend identified as confirmed waste (idle or unused resources). |
| Cost Allocation | The process of assigning cloud costs to specific teams, projects, or business units based on rules. |
| Showback | Displaying cloud costs to teams for visibility and awareness, without actually billing them. |
| Chargeback | Billing internal teams or departments for their actual cloud resource usage. |
| Cost Center | An organizational unit (team, department, or project) that owns and is responsible for cloud costs. |
| Allocation Rule | A condition that maps cloud resources to cost centers based on tags, services, accounts, or other attributes. |
| Tag Compliance | The percentage of cloud resources that have proper cost-attribution tags applied. |
Optimization
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Right-sizing | Adjusting a resource's capacity (CPU, memory, storage) to match its actual usage, eliminating over-provisioning. |
| Insight | An observation about a resource's usage pattern, such as "this instance is idle" or "this volume is underutilized." |
| Recommendation | An actionable optimization suggestion with estimated savings, such as "downsize this instance from m5.xlarge to m5.large." |
| Anomaly | An unexpected cost deviation that significantly exceeds the historical baseline for a service or resource. |
Commitments
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| RI (Reserved Instance) | An AWS commitment to use a specific instance type for 1 or 3 years in exchange for a discounted hourly rate. |
| SP (Savings Plan) | An AWS commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for 1 or 3 years. |
| CUD (Committed Use Discount) | A GCP commitment to use a specific amount of compute resources for 1 or 3 years at a discounted rate. |
| Reservation | An Azure commitment type similar to AWS Reserved Instances, offering discounts for pre-committed capacity. |
| Commitment Coverage | The percentage of eligible on-demand spend that is covered by active commitments (RIs, SPs, CUDs, or Reservations). |
Kubernetes
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Namespace | A Kubernetes logical partition used to organize workloads. CLARITY tracks costs at the namespace level across EKS, AKS, and GKE. |
AI Analysis
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Batch Validation | The automated AI review of all findings (recommendations, insights, anomalies) after each cloud data sync. |
| On-Demand Explain | A per-resource AI analysis triggered by clicking "Explain" on any finding, returning detailed context and action steps. |
Next Steps
- Return to Common Issues for troubleshooting help
- Review the Welcome page for a platform overview