As part of our service, we connect to your cloud environments to collect the necessary data for calculating the carbon footprint of your cloud usage. This section provides a high-level functional overview of what this entails, including the type of data we collect and why it is essential for sustainability insights.

☁️ What Is the Cloud?

The cloud refers to on-demand computing services—such as servers, storage, databases, and networking—delivered over the internet by cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Rather than owning and managing physical hardware, organizations use cloud resources that are metered, scalable, and managed by the provider.

Cloud usage generates resource consumption data, which includes detailed logs and usage reports. This data is the foundation for analyzing environmental impact.

📊 What Are CUR and Metric Data?

To compute the carbon footprint of your cloud usage, we rely primarily on two types of data:

1. Cost and Usage Reports (CUR)

Provided by cloud providers, CURs contain detailed billing and usage information at a granular level (down to individual services or resources).

CURs typically include:

• Service type (e.g., EC2, S3, BigQuery)
• Usage type and quantity (e.g., compute hours, storage GB-months)
• Resource ID and tags
• Geographic region
• Pricing and cost allocation

2. Metric Data (Cloud Monitoring or Telemetry Metrics)

Metrics provide real-time and historical performance data of your cloud resources.

Metrics we may use include:

• CPU utilization
• Memory usage
• Network throughput