By allocating cost data effectively, enterprises can use cost visualization tools to analyze costs from multiple dimensions and identify more cost issues and optimization opportunities.
Cost Analysis Visualization
Periodically conducting comprehensive and multidimensional cost analysis of cloud costs is essential to help enterprises perform operational management analysis from different perspectives and promptly detect business issues and cost optimization opportunities.
By using the "Cost Analysis" tool, enterprises can view the cost trend of resources from multiple dimensions (supporting up to 12 months), analyze the comprehensive cost structure, and predict future cost trends. The tool also allows saving a set of filtered data and corresponding conditions as a report for quick reference.
Use cost analysis to display costs with time granularity of month, day, and hour. Multiple dimensions can be used to display billing information, such as by product, product detail, financial unit, account, resource group, and tag. This helps enterprises gain a clear understanding of resource consumption.
Predict cost trends, such as long-term trends over 12 months.
Subscribe to reports to save commonly used cost analysis dimensions as reports for quick cost analysis from a report perspective.
Export cost analysis results for further analysis.
Compare Budget and Actual Consumption
After budget planning is completed, in addition to setting monitoring thresholds for automatic alerts, it is also necessary to analyze the execution of the budget on a regular basis. The "Budget vs. Actual Analysis" tool can be used to view the comparison between the actual consumption amount and the budgeted amount. Analyzing the budget execution provides insights into the overall health of the budget, the number of items that can be optimized, and the estimated amount that can be saved. This tool helps monitor and analyze the execution of the budget and the actual consumption.
The budget vs. actual trend report shows the cumulative actual value, the sum of the cumulative actual value and the forecast value, and the monthly growth trend.
The current period budget vs. actual report shows the current period's actual value, the sum of the current period's actual value and the forecast value, and the percentage with respect to the budgeted amount for the current period.
The budget records show the forecast value, actual value, and budgeted value for each rolling period within the budget start and end dates, as well as the differences between the actual value and the budgeted value.
The detailed report shows the occurrence details for a single rolling period and the corresponding actual consumption details for the dates.
Analyze Usage of Deducted Resources
Deducted resources refer to various resources, such as reserved instance coupons, storage capacity units, PolarDB compute units, and resource packages, that can be used to deduct related pay-as-you-go usage. The selling price of resource instances is lower than that of pay-as-you-go instances. By purchasing deducted resources, the usage cost of pay-as-you-go instances can be reduced.
For purchased deducted resources, it is important to periodically check and analyze their effectiveness to avoid waste caused by expiration or insufficient purchase leading to increased costs. By using the usage rate and coverage rate reports provided by Alibaba Cloud, the usage of deducted resources can be analyzed. If the usage rate is too low, there may be waste of deducted resources. If the coverage rate is too low, the purchase amount of deducted resources may be insufficient. The Resource Instance management is used to analyze the use of deducted resources.
Analyze and Forecast Cost Trends
Analyzing costs involves not only the past historical periods but also the future cost predictions. Regularly analyzing and predicting costs helps manage budgets and financial planning effectively.
The Budget management tool supports prediction features in both budget management and cost analysis scenarios.
In budget management, it supports cost predictions for up to 12 months and supports predictions at account, owner account, financial unit, product, product detail, region, and consumption type levels. It provides reference suggestions for budget planning.
In budget management, alert thresholds can be set for predicted costs to trigger alerts when the cost prediction reaches the threshold.
In cost analysis, it supports monthly cost trend predictions for up to 12 months and daily cost predictions for up to 90 days.
Apply Cost Optimization Recommendations
Using Cost Optimization recommendations enables enterprises to obtain usage recommendations for certain types of cloud resources, achieving cost savings.
By analyzing Cost Health, enterprises can view the overall health rating of current cloud costs, the number of items that can be optimized, and the estimated amount that can be saved. It also provides resource usage optimization recommendations.
Cost optimization consists of multiple tools, each suitable for different scenarios. Cost optimization recommendations are simulated calculations based on historical bill data, product features, and discounts. The actual results may vary and are only for reference. They need to be verified based on the actual business situation and continuously monitored for effectiveness.