Business Metrics

A business metric is any metric that your business tracks, such as users, requests, transactions, customers, revenue, or tokens. By importing these business metrics into Vantage, you can combine them with your cloud costs to answer questions that dollars alone can’t—like cost per customer, gross margin, tokens consumed per pull request, or how spend tracks against customer growth. Business metrics are applied as a visualization on Cost Reports. When you assign a metric to a Cost Report, you choose a calculation type that determines how Vantage combines the metric with your costs. All calculation types render on a secondary y-axis as a line overlay. See Calculation Types for the full list. In the visual example below, a business metric is visualized in the graph as a line alongside daily costs. You can use this visualization to understand how changes in the metric relate to changes in your costs.

A business metric displayed as a trend line on the graph in a Cost Report

Labeled Business Metrics

You can optionally include a label for each uploaded metric. The label identifies the source of the metric—like an associated application or cost center. For example, a metric like Monthly Active Users typically applies to more than one application. The ability to allocate these metrics is important for analyzing both overall user activity and individual application performance, enabling more informed decision-making at the application level. In the above example, you can create labels like Active Users App A, Active Users App B, etc. When you assign this metric to a Cost Report, you can decide which labels to include on the Cost Report and in the calculation. Any labels you decide to include will be aggregated in the calculation. So, in this example, if you decide to include only data with the Active Users App A label, then the calculation will use only that set of data. If you also include Active Users App B, then the calculation will aggregate both sets of labeled data.

Import Business Metrics

To get started with business metrics, you can also view a video demo on Vantage University .

Business metrics can be imported from other systems directly into Vantage and analyzed alongside cost data. You can automatically import metrics from Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, Metronome, and Snowflake; import them manually from a CSV file; or upload them via the Vantage API.

The following steps are for creating a Business Metric and importing historical metrics. If you want to automatically import metrics from another application, see Import via the Vantage API.

Imports load one billing period (month) at a time. On the Imported Metrics tab, each month in the period picker shows its own import state—a month still being imported is labeled Importing… and its data appears automatically once ready, while a month that could not be imported is labeled Failed. You can review completed months while others are still processing.

From the top navigation, click Financial Planning.

On the left navigation, click Business Metrics. All existing business metrics are displayed. You can edit or delete business metrics from this screen.

From the top right of the screen, click New Business Metric.

Enter a business metric Title and click Create Business Metric.

The Business Metrics screen is displayed with three tabs:

Metric Overview: Displays basic metric information (name, import type, integration details) and allows you to assign the metric to Cost Reports. See the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section for details.
Imported Metrics: Import historical business metrics from a CSV file, Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, Metronome, Snowflake, or upload via the Vantage API. This tab stores your historical metric data and is used for calculations on Cost Reports. While you can upload any dates (past, present, or future) to this tab, only dates up to the current cost buffer date are used for calculations. Future dates uploaded here are stored and will automatically appear on Cost Reports once that date becomes current (passes the cost buffer). Only data uploaded to the Forecasted Metrics tab will be used for Dynamic Forecasting.
Forecasted Metrics: Upload future projections of your business metrics to create Dynamic Forecasts. Only data uploaded to this tab will be used for Dynamic Forecasting. This tab accepts CSV uploads only (CloudWatch, Datadog, Metronome, and Snowflake integrations are not available for forecasted metrics). See the Forecasted Metrics section for details.

Import from a CSV File

You can upload a CSV file that uses the following three-column format. This CSV file can replace existing data or be used to import new data. The date column must be in YYYY-MM-DD format. The amount column must be a number. The label column is optional. See the section above for more information about labels.

A label can be added once per date.

date,amount,label
2024-01-09,295,app1
2024-01-16,909,app1
2024-01-23,934,app1
2024-01-30,772,app1
2024-01-09,344,app2
2024-01-16,789,app2
2024-01-23,922,app2
2024-01-30,768,app2
...

Click the Imported Metrics tab, then click Upload a CSV. Select the CSV file and upload. After the file is imported, a dropdown menu for each month is displayed. For months with imported metrics, the date and associated metric number are displayed. Months with no metrics are blank.

Click to view visual example

The Imported Costs section with costs displayed for a month

To add additional metrics or change the value of a metric, update your source CSV file. Then, click Edit and upload the edited file. The new or updated metric is displayed in the table. See the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section for the next steps.

Import from Amazon CloudWatch

To import business metrics from Amazon CloudWatch, you need a specific metric name and AWS account, as described below. Ensure AWS is one of your connected providers.

If Vantage does not have a Cross-Account IAM Role associated with your AWS account, you need to create one. See the AWS integration documentation for details.

Click the Imported Metrics tab, then click Import via CloudWatch.

For AWS Account, select the connected AWS account you want to import metrics from.

Select an AWS Region.

Enter a Namespace. A complete list of available namespaces can be found in the AWS documentation for AWS services that publish CloudWatch Metrics. Namespaces start with AWS/ followed by the service name (e.g., AWS/EC2).

Enter a Metric name. Each AWS service has metrics that it sends to CloudWatch. Available metrics can be found in CloudWatch or the AWS documentation.

The AWS documentation includes a list of available metrics for services. For example, you can view EC2 instance metrics. An example metric to track in this instance is CPUUtilization. For Amazon RDS, an example metric to track is WriteIOPS or ReadIOPS.

For Dimensions, enter a Name and Value. Dimensions are used to pull specific statistical data for a metric. For example, enter InstanceId with a value of i-1234567890abcdef0. Each CloudWatch metric has a set of dimensions you can select. Click + Add a Dimension to add more than one dimension.

For each import, you must specify the Aggregation function to be used because metrics will be aggregated to the day. Select either Sum, Average, Maximum, or Minimum.

Optionally, enter a dimension name for the Label Dimension field.

Click Import Data.

Click to view visual example

The CloudWatch metrics import screen with data added to each field

The metrics will be automatically synced, daily, along with cost data from other integrations. See the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section for the next steps.

Import from Datadog

To import business metrics from Datadog, ensure Datadog is one of your connected providers. If you do not have Datadog as one of your connected providers, you will be prompted to connect your Datadog account the first time you try to create a metric.

Click the Imported Metrics tab, then click Import via Datadog.

For Account, select the connected Datadog account for which you want to import metrics. If this is your first Datadog metric, you may be prompted to reauthorize your Datadog credentials and the required scopes for Vantage (i.e., billing_read, usage_read, metrics_read, and timeseries_query scopes).

For Raw Query, enter your Datadog metric, including aggregation, rollup formula, and label filters, into the text field. Your syntax should be similar to the following example:

aws.applicationelb.request_count{availabilityzone:us-east-1c, region:us-east-1}

The minimum aggregation for business metrics is daily. If you enter a lower granularity than daily, Vantage will perform aggregation at the daily level. For more information on the Datadog filtering syntax, see the Datadog documentation.

Click Import Data.

Click to view visual example

The Datadog metrics import screen with data added to each field

The metrics will be automatically synced, daily, along with cost data from other integrations. See the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section for the next steps.

Import from Snowflake

To import business metrics from Snowflake, ensure Snowflake is one of your connected providers. Vantage uses the selected Snowflake integration to run your query, so the configured Snowflake role needs read access to the tables or views referenced in the query. Scheduled query execution consumes Snowflake credits in your account. Your SQL query must return columns named date and value. You can optionally return a label column for grouped metrics. Use column aliases (AS) if your source table uses different column names. When you save the import, Vantage validates the query against Snowflake and requires the query to return at least one row.

Snowflake imports use value in the SQL result set. CSV and API imports use amount for the metric value.

Common Snowflake-backed metrics include daily requests, users, sessions, seats, transactions, orders, or product-specific usage events, such as AI invocations. For example, if several teams share one CloudFront distribution, you could import daily request counts by team from Snowflake. Vantage would import rows like 2026-01-01, 1500000, team-a, where date is the usage date, value is the number of requests, and label is the team. You could then attach that metric to a Cost Report filtered to the shared CloudFront distribution and use a Unit Scale like Per Million to view cost per million requests. For allocation use cases, the same label values can represent teams, applications, customers, or cost centers.

Click the Imported Metrics tab, then click Import via Snowflake.

For Snowflake Integration, select the connected Snowflake integration you want to query. If you have not connected Snowflake, click Connect Snowflake and complete the Snowflake integration setup first. Confirm the vantage user you created during connection has read access to any of the databases and schemas that you want to use for business metrics.

For SQL Query, enter a query that returns date, value, and optionally label columns. In the shared CloudFront distribution example discussed earlier, the following query imports daily request counts by team:

SELECT
  CAST(request_date AS DATE) AS date,
  COUNT(*) AS value,
  team AS label
FROM analytics.cloudfront_requests
WHERE distribution_id = 'E123EXAMPLE'
GROUP BY date, label

If this data is already modeled in Snowflake, such as in a dbt model or analytics view, query that model directly and alias the output columns to date, value, and optionally label. If the query references objects outside the database or schema configured for the Snowflake integration, use fully qualified names like database.schema.table and confirm the Vantage Snowflake role has SELECT access.

Click Import Data.

The metrics will be automatically synced, daily, along with cost data from other integrations. See the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section for the next steps.

Import from Metronome

To import revenue or usage data from Metronome, ensure Metronome is one of your connected apps. Metronome imports create labeled business metrics that can be assigned to Cost Reports, used in Canvas, and queried with the FinOps Agent. Metronome supports two metric types in Vantage:

Daily invoice revenue: Daily revenue from Metronome invoice breakdowns, labeled by customer. Use this for gross margin, customer profitability, and cost as a percentage of revenue.
Usage: Daily usage from a selected Metronome billable metric, labeled by customer. Use this for unit costs such as cost per compute hour, cost per API request, cost per storage GB-hour, or cost per AI token.

Click the Imported Metrics tab, then click Import via Metronome.

For Account, select the connected Metronome account for which you want to import revenue or usage metrics. If you have not connected Metronome yet, complete the Metronome integration setup first.

Select the Metronome metric you want to import.

Select Daily invoice revenue to import customer-level revenue.
Select a billable usage metric, such as Compute Hours, API Requests, Storage GB-Hours, AI Tokens, or Virtual Machine Hours, to import product usage.

Select a Label Source. Labels identify the customer associated with each metric value and power Cost Report calculations and Virtual Tag allocation.

Use Customer name for readable reporting by customer.
Use Ingest alias if your Metronome aliases are cleaner or match the identifiers your team uses outside Metronome.
Use Customer ID when you need stable identifiers or want to troubleshoot customer matching.

Click Import Data.

The metrics will be automatically synced daily. After the import completes, review the imported dates, amounts, and labels. Then see the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section to use the metric for unit costs, COGS analysis, margin reporting, or customer-level allocation.

For examples of Metronome-backed Canvas prompts, FinOps Agent prompts, and troubleshooting, see the Metronome integration documentation.

Import via the Vantage API

You can import business metrics to Vantage, from other applications, with the Vantage API. Use the /business_metrics endpoint to view, create, update, and delete business metrics. You can also delete specific business metric values by date range and label with DELETE /business_metrics/{token}/values. Ensure you have a valid Read/Write Vantage API token. See the API documentation for details on how to use these endpoints.

Calculation Types

When you assign a business metric to a Cost Report, you choose a calculation type that determines how Vantage combines the metric with your costs. Each calculation is performed per date bin (day, week, or month) and rendered on a secondary y-axis as a line overlay.

You can apply only one calculation type per Cost Report. You can add multiple business metrics to the same report, but they must all use the same calculation type so the secondary axis stays consistent. For example, if a report already uses a Gross Margin calculation, any additional metrics you add to that report must also use Gross Margin.The same business metric can use different calculation types on different Cost Reports. For example, you can apply a Revenue metric as Gross Margin on one report and as Raw Value on another.

Vantage supports four calculation types:

Calculation type	Formula (per date bin)	Unit Scale	Typical metric	Example question
Unit Cost	total cost ÷ business metric	Applies	Any unit (users, requests, customers)	What does it cost to serve one customer?
Usage Unit Cost	total provider usage ÷ business metric	Applies	A usage-driving unit	How many tokens do we burn per pull request?
Gross Margin	(revenue − cost) ÷ revenue	Ignored	Revenue	Is our cloud spend compressing margin?
Raw Value	business metric value (no calculation)	Ignored	Any raw value	How does customer growth track against spend?

Unit Cost

For each date bin, Vantage sums all costs on the report and divides by the summed (and optionally label-filtered) business metric to produce a cost per unit, such as cost per customer or cost per million API requests. This is the original business metric behavior, and existing metric applications continue to use it with no action required. Use the Unit Scale option to divide the business metric before the calculation—for example, to view cost per thousand requests instead of cost per request.

Use Unit Cost for reports where you care about spend efficiency against a business driver: AI coding tools vs. pull requests merged, infrastructure vs. active customers, or CDN spend vs. requests served. Look for patterns like cost per unit rising while the business metric stays flat (spend growing without matching output) or falling as volume scales (efficiency improving).

Usage Unit Cost

For each date bin, Vantage divides a cloud provider usage quantity by the business metric, producing a ratio like GB-hours per employee or LLM tokens consumed per pull request. Unit Scale applies exactly as it does for Unit Cost.

Usage Unit Cost is only available on Cost Reports that expose a usage quantity. Because a report can contain many different usage units, it is best practice to filter the Cost Report so all costs share the same unit (for example, GBs of storage) before applying this calculation.

Use Usage Unit Cost when you want efficiency in resource consumption, not dollars: tokens per pull request, storage GB-hours per employee, or compute hours per deployment. Look for patterns like usage per unit climbing (more wasteful consumption) or falling (each unit of output needing less resource), independent of price changes.

Gross Margin

For each date bin, Vantage calculates (revenue − cost) ÷ revenue and renders the result as a margin percentage alongside your costs. Because the result is a ratio, Unit Scale is ignored.

The business metric should represent revenue for this calculation to be meaningful. Metronome daily invoice revenue is a common source for this metric.

Use Gross Margin for Cost Reports scoped to the costs that deliver your product: cloud COGS, AI inference providers, or delivery infrastructure, paired with a revenue metric. Look for patterns like margin expanding as revenue outpaces those costs, or compressing when cost growth eats into profitability.

Raw Value

Vantage overlays the business metric value as-is on the secondary axis—no calculation is performed. Use this to visually correlate a raw metric, such as customer or transaction volume, against spend over time. Because the value is passed through directly, Unit Scale is ignored.

Use Raw Value when you want to overlay a business signal next to spend without calculating a ratio: monthly active users vs. core cloud spend, transactions vs. payment-processing costs, or signups vs. acquisition infrastructure. Look for patterns like spend rising while the metric stays flat, or the metric growing faster than costs.

Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports

Once your import is complete, you can assign metrics to one or more Cost Reports. You can also assign as many different business metrics to a Cost Report as you want, provided they use the same calculation type.

Under Assigned Cost Reports, click Assign a Report.

The Assign a Report popup window is displayed. In the Report dropdown menu, search for and select a Cost Report.

For Calculation, select how Vantage should apply the metric to the report: Unit Cost, Usage Unit Cost, Gross Margin, or Raw Value. See Calculation Types for details on each option. If the report already has other business metrics assigned, you must select the same calculation type they use.

For Unit Scale, select either Per Unit, Per Hundred, Per Thousand, Per Million, or Per Billion. The scale is used to divide the business metric before calculating the per unit value. Use this scale to create a per-unit cost, such as Cost per Thousand Requests. If you select Per Unit, no division occurs, and the actual metric number will be used within the Cost Report.

Unit Scale applies only to the Unit Cost and Usage Unit Cost calculation types. It is ignored for Gross Margin and Raw Value.

For Label Filter, select any labels that were imported with your data.

Any selected labels will be aggregated and applied to the Cost Report to calculate the result. For example, if you select the labels app1 and app2, the calculation will be an aggregate of the corresponding values for those labels. If you select only app1, then the calculation will only apply to values that correspond with the app1 label.
You can also select the unlabeled option, which includes any values that don’t have a corresponding label.

Click Save. The metric is displayed on the corresponding Cost Report based on the selected calculation type, scale, and optionally selected labels.

Calculations appear the same way when the Cost Report is added as a widget on a Dashboard. They are also included when you export a Cost Report or Dashboard.

Change a Calculation Type

You can change the calculation type of an assigned metric by editing its entry under Assigned Cost Reports. Because a report can use only one calculation type at a time, you can only change a metric’s calculation type if it is the sole business metric on that report. If the report has other business metrics assigned, remove them before changing the calculation type.

Assign via the API or Terraform

You can assign a business metric to a Cost Report and set its calculation type programmatically. When creating or updating a business metric with the /business_metrics endpoint, include the calculation_type field (unit_cost, usage_unit_cost, gross_margin, or raw_business_metric) alongside unit_scale and label_filter on each Cost Report token. To retrieve the calculated values for a report, use the GET /unit_costs endpoint. The same assignment can be managed in Terraform with the vantage_business_metric resource.

Forecasted Metrics

Dynamic forecasting is available to Enterprise customers only.

You can upload projected future values of your business metrics to create Dynamic Forecasts that align your cost projections with business growth expectations. When you upload forecasted business metrics, Vantage analyzes historical correlations between your costs and metrics, then incorporates your projections into forecasting models. You can create one forecast per business metric. To model different scenarios, update your existing forecast with new projected values, and all associated Cost Reports will reflect the updated projections.

Create a business metric

Follow the steps in the Import Business Metrics section above if you haven’t created a business metric yet.

Upload forecasted metrics

Once you’ve uploaded historical costs, select the Forecasted Metrics tab.Only data uploaded to the Forecasted Metrics tab will be used for Dynamic Forecasting. Upload either a CSV file with your projected metrics, or use the Vantage API. Use the same CSV format as historical data, optionally including labels, for example:

date,amount,label
2026-11-01,5000,app1
2026-11-02,5200,app1
2026-11-03,5400,app1
2026-11-01,3000,app2
2026-11-02,3100,app2
2026-11-03,3200,app2

You cannot upload forecasted metrics through the native Datadog, CloudWatch, Metronome, or Snowflake business metrics integrations. Forecasted metrics must be uploaded manually via CSV or API.

Assign to a Cost Report

Assign the business metric to a Cost Report if you haven’t already. See the Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports section for details.

View and manage your forecast

Review the Forecasting documentation to learn how to view your Dynamic Forecast on Cost Reports and compare forecast types.

View Business Metrics on Cost Reports

A business metric calculation displayed on a Cost Report

To inspect your business metric calculations, navigate to the assigned Cost Report. The calculation renders on a secondary y-axis as a line overlay:

Unit Cost and Usage Unit Cost display the per-unit value, and the average for the selected date range is displayed at the top of the screen. This average is calculated by first binning business metrics according to the selected date bucket (day, week, or month), then dividing the total costs (or usage) by the total binned business metrics for date bins where both values are available. This ensures accurate results that respect the date bucket size used by the report.
Gross Margin displays the margin percentage over the selected date range.
Raw Value displays the metric value as-is, making it easy to correlate the metric against spend.

To see the calculation line, ensure your view is set to daily, weekly, or monthly.

Hover over a data point to see the value for that day, week, or month. If you add multiple business metrics to the same Cost Report, each business metric is displayed as a separate line, as shown in the example above.

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Cost Reporting Features

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Business Metrics

Labeled Business Metrics

Import Business Metrics

Import from a CSV File

Import from Amazon CloudWatch

Import from Datadog

Import from Snowflake

Import from Metronome

Import via the Vantage API

Calculation Types

Unit Cost

Usage Unit Cost

Gross Margin

Raw Value

Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports

Change a Calculation Type

Assign via the API or Terraform

Forecasted Metrics

View Business Metrics on Cost Reports

​Labeled Business Metrics

​Import Business Metrics

​Import from a CSV File

​Import from Amazon CloudWatch

​Import from Datadog

​Import from Snowflake

​Import from Metronome

​Import via the Vantage API

​Calculation Types

​Unit Cost

​Usage Unit Cost

​Gross Margin

​Raw Value

​Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports

​Change a Calculation Type

​Assign via the API or Terraform

​Forecasted Metrics

​View Business Metrics on Cost Reports

Labeled Business Metrics

Import Business Metrics

Import from a CSV File

Import from Amazon CloudWatch

Import from Datadog

Import from Snowflake

Import from Metronome

Import via the Vantage API

Calculation Types

Unit Cost

Usage Unit Cost

Gross Margin

Raw Value

Assign Business Metrics to Cost Reports

Change a Calculation Type

Assign via the API or Terraform

Forecasted Metrics

View Business Metrics on Cost Reports