As you expand your use of the cloud, cost management becomes increasingly important. But lack of visibility into spending practices can hamper your cloud cost management efforts. With cloud costs constantly fluctuating and decision-making often decentralized in large organizations, gaining visibility into expenses can be challenging. The right cloud management tools can help reveal and eliminate hidden costs associated with the cloud and provide a holistic view of all your cloud cost centers.

 

Budget management and forecasting can make understanding and optimizing your cloud costs easier. Budget management refers to the process of overseeing and tracking financial plans and limits over a given period to effectively manage and control spending. Forecasting involves analyzing historical trends and future plans to predict costs, understand the impact on current budgets, and influence future budgets.

FinOps best practices play a pivotal role in budget management and forecasting. FinOps encourages collaboration within your organization, increasing visibility into your cloud investment to all levels of the organization while helping you gain more financial control and predictability to optimize cloud spend. This blog will help you understand the budget management and forecasting capabilities within the FinOps Framework and how Azure tools can help you make the most of them.

Effective budget management helps organizations operate within their means and achieve financial goals. Unexpected costs can impact external business decisions and initiatives that could have widespread impact. The updated Exports user interface in Microsoft Cost Management, currently in preview, helps you easily create multiple exports for various cost management datasets to Azure storage using a single, simplified create experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the new Exports experience. First, it includes automatic exports of more cost-impacting datasets, including price sheets, reservation recommendations, reservation details, and reservation transactions. It is also optimized to handle large datasets because FinOps datasets can be large and complex. Now, you can easily handle large datasets through features like file partitioning, breaking the file into manageable chunks, and file overwrite for daily exports, which replaces the previous day’s file with an updated file each day. These optimizations improve file manageability, reduce download latency, and save on storage and network charges.  

 

You can selectively export historical data by rerunning an existing Export job for a historical period so you don’t have to create a new one-time export for a specific date range. You can also download cost and usage details using the open-source FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) format. It combines actual and amortized costs, reducing data processing times and storage and compute costs.

 

Enable the new Exports experience from Cost Management labs by turning on ‘Exports (preview)’ button. For more information, visit Explore preview features.  

 

Once you’ve used Exports to gather the cost data you need, you can use Microsoft Fabric to make analyzing that data easier. Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software-as-a-service platform that covers everything from data movement to data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place. With Fabric, you can enjoy a highly integrated, end-to-end, and easy-to-use product that simplifies your analytics needs. By creating a single platform with tools for every data professional in a unified experience and architecture, Fabric can reduce the typical cost and effort of integrating analytics services. Fabric’s unified architecture simplifies billing by providing a single pool of capacity and storage that is used for every workload. 

Fabric also includes Copilot functionalities. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, you can use natural language to create dataflows and pipelines, write SQL statements, build reports, or even develop machine learning models. 

 

 

Learn more about Microsoft Fabric here. 

Azure has made it easy for you to spin up and provision virtual machines whenever you want. What used to take six months can now be done in seconds. But because you can do it in seconds, it’s extremely easy to over-provision. Managing the size and number of your virtual machines or virtual machine scale sets can help you save money, but identifying those idle and underutilized resources yourself can be difficult. Now you don’t have to.

Azure Advisor uses machine-learning algorithms to identify low utilization and to identify the ideal recommendation to ensure optimal usage of virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets. We help you identify where you’re over-provisioned and may be wasting capacity. For example, if you’re using 16 core machines but your utilization is only 10 percent, you may want to right-size to improve utilization and reduce costs. Advisor provides your recommended actions, such as shut down or resize, specific to the resource being evaluated. You can also set up a filter for each subscription to only show recommendations for machines with certain CPU utilization. This setting will filter recommendations but will not change how they are generated.

Learn more about using Azure Advisor to reduce service costs here.

This spring, we’ll introduce our Event Readiness workbook, a self-help solution designed to prepare you for a significant event – such as a cloud migration or new deployment. The Event Readiness workbook will help guide your thinking as you make that change. For example, what are the checkpoints you should verify? How can you mitigate risks while preparing for the event to get the best possible experience? How will the new event affect your costs? We also offer an event readiness service where you can pay to have a Microsoft CSA directly guide you through event readiness. The Event Readiness workbook can be used in addition to the paid service or as a self-help solution if you prefer to go it alone. Watch for more information on the Event Readiness workbook coming soon.

Each of the tools discussed here can be used to enable FinOps capabilities and help you develop an effective budget management and forecasting plan to manage and control spending and influence future budgets. In addition, we recently released a FinOps Review Assessment based on guidance from the FinOps Foundation framework that can help you work to align your business with FinOps practices and principles. For more information you can also see the Budget management or the Forecasting capability article in the FinOps Framework documentation.

Learn more about using FinOps best practices for budget management and forecasting at aka.ms/finops/solutions.