Budget Management

Introduction

Budget management is central to the FinOps activities as described in the framework of the FinOps foundation.

In summary, those activities are:

The Teevity FinOps platform will help you along those tasks. 

Here are the different tools to create, edit and use your cloud costs budgets.

How to Create a Budget

Create a new budget based on your current spending

Instead of starting from scratch, the best way to bootstrap your effort is to use the current spend as a baseline. For example, here's a report with the costs by month and by product for the current year. You can also use any cost partitions to aggregate your costs. 

When you are satisfied with your aggregation of the spend you can create a skeleton of a budget based on the results of your query:

You can then customize the budget with: 

When you are ready to create your budget, click on the "save" button and you will get a confirmation message. Continue reading below to know how to view and further personalize this budget.

NB : you can also use the API to manage your budget if you need to update them frequently, use an external application to provide some forecasts , etc. The endpoints start with the /baselineManagement prefix

List your budgets

View your Budgets

Navigate to the "Budgets List" section of the preferences page

N.B. : To be able to visit this page you will need to have the admin role.

You can edit, duplicate or delete a budget. To edit click on the first icon in the actions column (1). 

Edit a budget

Overview of the settings of a budget

When editing a budget you can:

For the details of the budget:

Edit a series in a budget

To edit a series, for example to adjust a month because you know there's a seasonal effect that will affect your spend for this particular period, you can click on a value of a series to adjust the amount. 

You can choose to apply this adjustment to the remainder of the time range, if you know that a change will affect a spend for the entire or remaining of the year.

Add a time range in a budget

When you create a budget based on your past spend you will need to project those costs in the future to monitor your budget. 

Add an item in a budget

Finally, you can add an item in the series, for a new product, cost allocation unit, etc. 

How to Use your Budgets in the Dynamic Cost Explorer (DCE)

Now that you have created and fine-tuned your budget, you will want to leverage it in the exploration of your cloud spend.

Add an overlay of your budget

You can use an overlay to display the amount of your budget alongside the actual spend.


NB: you will need to use the same time granularity as your budget (monthly, daily etc.) and also the same "group by" since you want to compare product to product or cost allocation unit to cost allocation and not apples to oranges. 


The budget limit displayed as an overlay

View the variance i.e. spend versus budget

With the overlay enabled, you can now see the differences between your budget limit and the actual spend. 

In this first example the spend is mostly unfavorable to the budget in April 2023. It means that there are more expenses than as planned in the budget. For each item of the budget the deviation is displayed in absolute and actual terms.

In this second example the spend is mostly favorable to the budget in February 2023. It means that there are less expenses than as planned in the budget.

NB : a favorable trend is not always welcomed if the difference is big enough. Because a budget is used to allocate the capital of the company, those funds could have been better used in another project, this represents an opportunity cost.

Follow your budget in a dashboard

Like any others reports you can save the result of your queries in a dashboard. Here, for example, along with the details of the previous months on the right, we are showing a summary of the variance for the year to date on the left. 

To build this dashboard, you will need for both widgets:

And either