Today, Vantage is launching On-Prem Support for the Kubernetes Agent, enabling customers to track costs for Kubernetes deployments in their own data centers. Customers can now apply node-level cost annotations directly within their Kubernetes deployments and have Vantage ingest and calculate corresponding pod-level costs in addition to public cloud deployments.

Previously, Vantage’s Kubernetes agent only supported tracking costs for clusters running on public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Customers looking to track their on-prem costs used Custom Providers to bring costs into the Vantage platform. This would require them to format their costs in a FOCUS format, and upload on a recurring basis. Cost allocation of Kubernetes workloads wasn't previously supported, and customers had to leverage third-party tools with their own observability capabilities, and would require extensive manual calculations in order to project metrics onto associated cost data.

Now, Vantage extends cost visibility and efficiency analytics to any on-prem Kubernetes environment. Customers can define annotations for the following on a per node basis:

• ram_gb_hourly_rate
• vcpu_hourly_rate
• storage_gb_hourly_rate
• gpu_gb_hourly_rate

Once set, Vantage will apply these rates to provide pod-level costs accordingly. Customers then gain visibility into on-prem Kubernetes compute efficiency, idle cost, and workload utilization through Kubernetes Efficiency reports. They can also allocate costs by team or application using Cost Reports and Virtual Tags.

On-Prem Kubernetes support is available today for all users of the Vantage Kubernetes Agent, with no version update required. To get started, see the Kubernetes Agent documentation for configuration details.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching On-Prem Support for the Kubernetes Agent, allowing customers to track and allocate costs for on-prem Kubernetes deployments.

2. Who is the customer?

Any customer operating Kubernetes clusters on-premises, in colocation environments, or in hybrid architectures, can use this feature to achieve cost transparency across all compute environments.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional charge for using on-prem annotations. This capability is included with the standard Kubernetes Agent functionality. However, on-prem Kubernetes costs will be included in quota tier enforcement. In the event that your on-prem Kubernetes costs push you over your current tier limit, you may be prompted to upgrade. To see more details on pricing, please refer to the Pricing page.

4. How does it work?

Customers can specify cost rate annotations on each node in their Kubernetes cluster using annotations, such as the example values shown below. Note that only RAM and CPU are required:

metadata:
  annotations:
    ram_gb_hourly_rate: "0.0012"
    gpu_gb_hourly_rate: "0.004"
    vcpu_hourly_rate: "0.0025"
    storage_gb_hourly_rate: "0.0001"

The Vantage Kubernetes Agent ingests these annotations and applies them when calculating costs. Once processed, these costs appear in:

• Kubernetes Efficiency Reports – to identify idle or underutilized workloads
• Cost Reports – to visualize and allocate on-prem costs by team, namespace, or application
• Virtual Tags – to align on-prem spend with your existing tagging hierarchy

5. What happens if a node doesn’t have an annotation?

If a rate annotation is missing, Vantage will skip cost calculation for that specific resource. To maintain accurate visibility, we recommend applying all four annotation keys (ram, vcpu, gpu, storage) consistently across your on-prem nodes.

6. How frequently are metrics collected?

Workload metrics are collected based on your polling period, which is default to every 60 seconds but as low as 5 seconds. These are sent to Vantage on an hourly basis. In the event that your Kubernetes workloads cannot communicate with the Vantage APIs, the Kubernetes Agent’s Data Persistence Recovery will retain the data for up to 96 hours.

7. How frequently are metrics updated in the Vantage console?

Kubernetes costs will be refreshed daily. For more information, see our Provider Data Refresh documentation.

8. Can I combine on-prem and cloud-based Kubernetes costs in one report?

Yes, you can see all Kubernetes workloads in both Kubernetes Efficiency Reports and Cost Reports for reporting across on-prem and cloud providers.

9. Will I receive rightsizing recommendations for on-prem Kubernetes workloads?

Yes, Vantage will provide Kubernetes Rightsizing Recommendations for on-prem workloads. Savings for these recommendations will be driven off of the custom rates you provide.