Making Cost Information Available in RealTheory

Background

RealTheory provides cost analysis for Kubernetes environments by using rate cards and rate card policies. Together, these determine how costs are calculated and which pricing model is applied to each cluster.
To display accurate cost data in RealTheory, every cluster must have an appropriate rate card assigned. If cost data is not displaying in RealTheory, it’s usually for one of the following reasons:

• No rate card exists yet
• A rate card exists, but it hasn't been assigned to the cluster
• A rate card exists and is assigned to the cluster, but there isn't currently enough cost data to display

Solution

Step 1: Identify Where Your Cluster is Running

If your cluster is running in a supported cloud provider:

• RealTheory can automatically calculate costs using cloud pricing
• Use one of the built-in rate cards (On-Demand, Reserved 1-Year, Reserved 3-Year), or apply a Discount or Custom rate card if your pricing deviates from standard plans

If your cluster is running in a private data center, an unsupported cloud, or on bare metal:

• You must create and assign a Custom rate card
• Custom rate cards enable you to define pricing for nodes, storage, networking, shared costs, etc., allowing RealTheory to calculate accurate costs for objects across your environment

Step 2: Ensure the Appropriate Rate Card Is Applied to the Cluster

For cloud providers natively integrated with RealTheory (currently Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform), the default rate card is automatically applied to each cluster. This ensures that cost data is available out of the box, although the default rates might not precisely match your negotiated or actual cloud pricing.

For environments that are not natively integrated with RealTheory—such as private data centers, currently non-natively integrated cloud providers, or bare metal servers—cost data will not appear until a rate card is created and assigned to the cluster.

Rate cards can be applied in two ways:

• Direct assignment – Suitable for simple or static environments.
• Rate card policies – Recommended for larger or dynamic environments, where rate cards are automatically applied based on cluster labels to reduce manual effort and configuration drift.

If you manage many clusters or multiple pricing plans, use Rate Card Policies.

Step 3: Address Missing Cost Data

See Also
Creating a Discount Rate Card
Creating a Custom Rate Card
Rate Card Policies Explained