Budgets and Forecasts

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Budgets and Forecasts helps you understand and predict your cloud spends by:

  • Creating forecasts based on historical spending patterns.
  • Using forecasts to create budgets .
  • Monitor and notify spending related to budgets.

These tools are all based around views, allowing you to separate individual Business Units and manage them independently. If you are currently on a Pro plan, you can only use these features at the organization level. See Views API for more information on creating views programmatically.

Some of the features of these tools are:

  • Support for multiple accounting options, including Cash (recommended), Amortized (helpful if your organization buys Partial/All-Upfront RIs), Adjusted (reflecting any Custom Pricing agreements you have calibrated) and Adjusted Amortized .
  • Set up periodic alerts to receive notifications and spendings for the current month.
  • Simple views to analyze your budget,
  • Paired with Anomaly Detection service.

Using the Cost (List) metric for budgeting and forecasting

Cost (List) allows you to budget and forecast your cloud spend using consistent cost metrics.

If an instance usage has been covered by an all-upfront reservation, the Cost (Total) will show $0 while the Cost (List) will show the on-demand cost for that particular usage. On the other hand, for recurring monthly fees and occasional one-time fees, Cost (List) will show $0 as these are likely the charges to be excluded for budget and forecasting exercises. For spot instances, the Cost (Total) displays the actual deeply discounted cost while Cost (List) shows the on-demand cost for that particular usage.

The FAQ explains how Cloudability generates Cost (List) values. The difference between Cost (List) and Cost (Total) or Cost (Adjusted) shows the overall benefits of reservations and custom pricing.

budgets and forecasting screenshot

If specific cost metrics are not exposed, use Cost (List) to provide chargeback to consumers (or business units, account groups, etc.).

cost screenshot

You can set up daily email notifications.

cloud spend summary emails screenshot

FAQ

Which Public Cloud Vendors does Cost (List) support?

Cost (List) supports AWS and GCP.

Why does Cost (List) sometimes show a lower value than the other cost metrics do?

The primary use case of the Cost (List) metric is around Budgets and Forecasting. Cloudability zeroes out the values of certain line items depending on transaction types and lease types to help reduce the noise in Budget and Forecasting work. The line items that Cloudability zeroes out include:

  • Recurring RI Upfront Fees
  • One-time RI Upfront Fees
  • Custom Pricing Credits

Which items does Cloudability report as is for Cost (List)?

Cloudability reports the extraordinary credits (ex. Billing error correction) as is for Cost (List). In the case of GCP, Cloudability zeroes out the credits for Committed Usage Discounts. The credits for Sustained Usage Discounts, however, get reported as is. Again, it’s all about the primary use case of the Cost (List) — Budget and Forecasting. The items being reported as-is for Cost (List) are the ones that consumers (or business units, account groups) need to account for Budget and Forecasting works.