Cost Management, Support, and Account Governance
Domain 6 - Cost Management, Support, and Account Governance. This domain tests visibility and control of spend, support escalation, and account structures that scale.
Cost management
IBM Cloud Cost Estimator models solutions before purchase. Cost and Usage reports show actual spend by service, resource, and tag. Budgets send alerts at thresholds; they do not cap usage or stop resources, so pair alerts with automation and ownership. Tags support chargeback and showback. Reserved capacity or savings plans can reduce steady-state cost; right-sizing and deleting orphaned resources control drift.
Support
IBM Cloud Support Center handles cases. Support plans differ in response targets, channels, and technical guidance; Basic is self-service, while Advanced and Premium add case severity and faster response. Include case severity, impact, resource IDs, timestamps, and reproduction steps. Status pages communicate platform incidents; support does not replace your own monitoring.
Account governance
An IBM Cloud account is the billing and resource container. Enterprises can group accounts and account groups for centralized management. Resource groups organize resources for access and lifecycle; IAM policies grant least privilege; access groups scale assignments. The account owner should be protected with MFA and not used for routine operations.
Worked example
A department exceeds budget monthly. Create tags for cost center and application, enforce tagging at provisioning, review Cost and Usage by tag, right-size oversized VPC instances, and set budget alerts to the owner. A budget alert alone would only notify after spend; governance changes the behavior.
Traps
Budgets are alerts, not hard stops; support plan response targets are not resolution guarantees; tags only help if consistently applied; and deleting a resource group can remove resources, so scope policies carefully.