Chargeback Overview

The Chargeback feature enables platform teams to monitor and allocate costs associated with Kafka usage across teams, domains, and services. It provides full transparency into resource consumption and cost distribution, helping enforce internal budgeting, accountability, and optimization.

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Overview

Chargeback allows you to define cost rates and calculate usage-based costs for:

• Produced bytes

• Consumed bytes

• Storage (per GB)

• Per-topic cost

• Per-partition cost

Costs are tracked and visualized at multiple levels:

• Topic

• Service (logical group of topics, consumers, producers, etc.)

• Domain (business ownership layer)

You can analyze costs over different time intervals:

• Hourly

• Daily

• Monthly

• Yearly

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Cost Configuration

You can define cost rates:

• Globally (applied to all clusters)

• Per cluster (overriding global rates)

Rates are configured in the Portal under:

Administration → Chargeback

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Data Export

The calculated cost metrics can optionally be published to an internal topic: _dsh.costs

This allows integration into:

• Custom dashboards

• Alerting pipelines

• Real-time analytics (e.g., via SQL queries in the Stream Lab)

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Example Use Cases

• Detect high-volume consumers with low business impact

• Enforce internal usage quotas per business unit

• Feed cost breakdowns into BI tools

• Trigger alerts on sudden cost spikes

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Best Practices

• Align cost metrics with infrastructure billing rates

• Define ownership in your service/domain model for accurate attribution

• Use _dsh.costs topic as a source for fine-grained real-time observability