Preventing budget overages by identifying business services that are exceeding their budgets

Scenario

Frank is the Finance Head of an IT organization. He analyzes the cloud costs and plans for the cloud budget to ensure that the current and future requirements are met. He manages and monitors the business services in the on-premises and public cloud environment.  

Current problem: Frank wants to know whether the budgets that are currently allocated to the existing business services are efficiently utilized or not. He wants to find out whether there are any overspender business services that need to be analyzed and managed. 

Solution: Frank can use the Budget page of the TrueSight Cloud Cost Control to quickly get the information that he wants. On the page, He can view and compare the budget details for all business services and identify the overspender business services. He can easily export the page details to a PDF or a spreadsheet for offline analysis and reference. For more information, see the following sections:

• Workflow
• Prerequisites
• Steps

Workflow

The following illustration provides a high-level view of the process.

Prerequisites

Let us assume that the following prerequisite tasks are completed:

1. Alan, the TrueSight Cloud Cost Control administrator, has completed the necessary prerequisite tasks to set up the budgeting functionality so that Frank can view and use the budgeting feature.

   1. Install TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.
   2. Configure data collection to import the public cloud and on-premises infrastructure data. For more information, see Collecting-data.
   3. Authorize Frank to access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.
   4. Discuss with Frank and configure the required budget settings such as defining the budget cycle and setting the thresholds for budget to classify the business services as underspender or overspender. 

   Review the following steps to configure the budget thresholds

   1. Log on to the TrueSight console.
   2. Expand the left navigation pane and select Cloud Cost Control.
      The Cloud Cost Control page is displayed.
   3. Click > Settings. 
      The Settings page is displayed.  
   4. Click the Budget tab.
   5. Click the Settings action menu and select Edit.
      The page refreshes and all the fields on the page are displayed in edit mode.

   6. Specify the values for the following fields to set the thresholds for the budget to decide whether a business service is underspending, overspending, or in budget.

      Field	Description
      Underspenders	Specify the threshold value in percentage. If the projected cost percentages for a business service is less than this value, the business service is classified as Underspender.
      Overspenders	Specify the threshold value in percentage. If the projected cost percentages for a business service is greater than this value, the business service is classified as Overspender.

      If the projected cost percentage value for a business service is between the underspenders and overspenders thresholds values, the business service is classified as In budget. This classification information is displayed on the Budget page and the budget tab in the Business Service Cost Details page.

2. Individual business service owners have set the budget for their business services as specified by Frank.

   Review the following short video to set the budget

   

Steps

Frank performs the steps as given in the following order:

• Step 1: Access 
• Step 2: Review business services that are exceeding their budgets
• Step 3: Save an offline copy of the final results as a report.

Step 1: Access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control

1. 
   
   1. Log on to the TrueSight console to access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.
   2. Click the Budget tab. The Budget page opens that displays all the business services for which budget has been allocated.
      

Step 2: Review business services that are exceeding their budgets

1. 
   
   1. (Optional) In the Budget page, review the Projected Classification chart to know the number of business services that are overspending, underspending, or properly utilizing their budgets.
   2. In the summary table, review the Projected Classification column that displays the values as Overspender, In budget, and Underspender. Hovering your mouse on any of these values, the filter icon is displayed.
   3. Click  next to Overspender. The Budget page refreshes and filters out business services that have already exceeded their budget or projected to exceed the budget as shown in the following image:
      

Step 3: Save an offline copy of the final results as a report.

Click > Settings and select Export to PDF or Export to Excel.

Frank can use the offline report and discuss it with the service owners of the overspender business services. To prevent the budget overage, they can choose to increase the budget and make adjustments to future budget allocation. Also, the service owners can look for saving opportunities such as slowing down usage of their resources to stay within the operational budgets.