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 your multi-cloud infrastructure.

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

The following cloud providers are supported:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud
On-premises

Estimating the cost of migrating servers to the public cloud

Assessing the business spending across your multi-cloud environments

Using

Before you begin

Ensure that the administrator completes the following tasks:

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 on 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. The data behind 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 any previous month. The costs are displayed as a number in a table, or as pie or bar charts. You can further explore the resources by applying various filters and page-level customization.

The global cost provider filter on top of the page enables you to show or hide the provider's data on the page. Each provider filter button displays the cost trend (for example,, ) that signifies whether the monthly cost of the provider is increasing or decreasing as compared to the previous month, and by what percentage. For example, the following screenshot shows that the on-premises and Google Cloud costs have decreased, while that of AWS and Azure have increased as compared to the previous month.

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 the 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:

Addition of an extraordinary number of new resources or services, which were not observed during the history periods.
Termination of an extraordinary number of new resources or services, which were not observed during the history periods.
An extraordinary increase or decrease in resource usage, which was not observed during the history periods.

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

To analyze and forecast multi-cloud costs

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