Analyzing and forecasting multi-cloud costs

TrueSight Cloud Cost Control enables you to track and manage the historical, current, and forecasted cloud costs with visibility across multi-cloud infrastructure.

To access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control, in the navigation pane of the TrueSight console, select > Cloud Cost Control.

For more information, see the following sections:

Estimating the cost of migrating servers to the public cloud

Assessing the business spending across your multi-cloud environments

Using

Overview

TrueSight Cloud Cost Control provides visibility and control over multi-cloud costs and resources, and helps you achieve many use cases.

Common use cases

View actual and forecasted multi-cloud monthly and annual costs.
Compare on-premises and public cloud resource costs.
Categorize and view the type of multi-cloud services used and their costs.
Identify most expensive resources, applications, or services.
Analyze resource usage and cost for each business service.
Track and manage multi-cloud cost by business unit.
Identify idle and unused resources.
Analyze resources for downsizing services based on usage trends.
Spot anomalous usage patterns that increase costs.

Cost visibility

You can get a summarized and detailed view of the cost comparison between the cloud providers based on the following dimensions:

Cloud provider
Cloud service
Business service
Server

Each dimension is displayed in a separate page in the user interface.

You can analyze the costs by custom dimensions as well, such as by resource type, region, account ID, and so on. If you have organized your resources by applying tags, you can use tags as a dimension too. You can further explore the resources by applying various filters and page-level customization.

The data in these views is updated daily so that you can get the most up-to-date information about your costs. By default, costs for the current month are displayed. You can choose to view the costs for a previous month. The costs are displayed as a number in a table or as pie or bar charts. The costs are displayed only in USD ($), you cannot change this currency.

Cost forecasts

You can view forecasted costs (up to six months in the future) alongside historical costs in a bar chart. For each bar that shows the forecasted costs, there are two lines (upper and lower bounds) on either side of the top of your bar. These lines indicate the probability that your bill or cost will fall in the range between these bounds.

You can view the forecasted costs for the following dimensions:

Cloud provider
Cloud service
Business service

Note

Cost forecasts are predictions. They are based on historical cost data. The Cost Estimation service applies algorithms to this data to extrapolate a modeled behavior and to forecast future costs.

The forecasted costs might differ from your actual charges for each month. Here are some of the reasons for the difference:

Start of an extraordinary number of new resources or services, which were not observed in the past periods.
Termination of an extraordinary number of new resources or services, which were not observed in the past periods.
An extraordinary increase or decrease in resource usage, which were not observed in the past periods.

The accuracy of the cost forecasts improves as the amount of historical data increases.

Before you begin

Ensure that the administrator completes the following tasks:

To analyze and forecast multi-cloud costs

To analyze and forecast your multi-cloud costs by different dimensions, see the following topics: