Use Case: Detecting, Diagnosing, and Optimizing Rising Cloud Costs
An enterprise notices cloud bills rising month over month, with spend exceeding budget forecasts and unclear drivers behind the increase. Leaders need to understand what’s driving cost, see trends over time, and prioritize optimization opportunities to control cloud expenses.
Platform Capabilities
Virtana Platform's Cloud Cost Management (CCM) module provides the following features:
Overview Dashboard: Displays both historical and current cloud spend trends.
Bill Analysis: Provides detailed cost breakdowns by service, account, and resource.
Cost Saving Opportunities: Highlights idle or underutilized resources and offers right-sizing recommendations.
Cost vs. Utilization (CvU) Reports: Analyzes spend relative to actual resource usage.
Setup
Before you begin, ensure that you are meeting the prerequisites and trigger conditions.
Prerequisites
Before analyzing rising cloud costs, ensure the following setup steps are completed:
Cloud provider billing is fully integrated. This includes connecting billing exports from AWS, Azure, and (optionally) GCP—supported in early access. Integration may include establishing read-only roles, enabling cost and usage reports, configuring export destinations, and confirming that historical billing data is successfully imported into the Virtana platform.
Cloud Cost Management (CCM) module is configured in Virtana. The CCM module must be activated within the Virtana Platform, connected to the integrated billing sources, and validated for proper data ingestion.
Business units, accounts, and resource groups are defined for analysis. Ensure that all relevant organizational entities, such as departments, cost centers, projects, environments, and cloud accounts, are mapped in Virtana.
Trigger
Finance and engineering teams notice the following occurrences:
This month's cloud spend is greater than last month's by a significant margin.
Forecast projections suggest that the budget will be exceeded by end of cycle.
The team opens the Cloud Cost Management dashboards to investigate.
Tasks & Workflow
The following tasks and observations make up this suggested workflow.
View Spend Trends in the Overview Dashboard
The team reviews the CCM Overview Dashboard to compare current-month spend with previous months. Visual indicators such as red upward arrows highlight increasing costs, and trend lines show a steady rise across the last three billing cycles.
Observation: Overall, spending is accelerating beyond typical historical patterns.
Run Bill Analysis to Break Down Costs
Using the Bill Analysis view, the team examines spend by cloud service, account, and resource group. By comparing current and previous periods, including deltas and percentage changes, they identify notable growth in compute and storage charges, largely driven by a small number of accounts and services.
Observation: A few accounts and services disproportionately contribute to total cost escalation.
Identify Cost Savings Opportunities
In the Cost Saving Opportunities dashboard, the team evaluates idle resources, such as unattached volumes and under-utilized instances, as well as right-sizing recommendations.
Observation: Several low-utilization, high-cost compute instances and unnecessary storage expenses present immediate savings opportunities.
Use Cost vs. Utilization (CvU) Reports
Running a CvU report allows the team to visualize cost relative to utilization for each instance. This quickly exposes high-cost assets with minimal usage, including a set of EC2 instances operating below 10% utilization that are strong candidates for resizing or termination.
Observation: The set of EC2 instances with high cost and low use are prime candidates for resizing or termination.
Present Business Impact & Actions
The team compiles a summary report showing six-month spend trends, key cost drivers, and insights from utilization analysis. They also estimate potential savings from actions such as right-sizing and removing idle resources. This report is shared with FinOps and leadership to support optimization decisions and budget adjustments.
What You're Observing
These are the key capabilities that you're using:
Accurate Cost Trend Analysis
Gain clear visibility into spending with the ability to easily track:
Month-over-month cost comparisons
Spend acceleration patterns to spot rapid changes
Forecasted versus actual spend for budget adherence
All of this data is presented in an intuitive, graphical dashboard for quick interpretation.
Actionable Optimization Recommendations
The platform goes beyond just highlighting rising costs; it provides concrete recommendations by:
Identifying and highlighting idle or wasteful cloud resources
Suggesting right-sizing opportunities to match resource capacity to actual demand
Breaking down costs by specific business units and services
This powerful linkage translates technical analysis into informed business decisions.
Business Impact Context and Governance
The dashboards empower teams to connect crucial financial data points:
Budget forecasts
Actual spend
Potential cost savings
This comprehensive view directly supports effective FinOps reviews and robust cost governance practices.
Business Value
The following table show the outcome of applying Virtana Platform in this scenario and the value that this outcome brings to your business.
Outcome | Value |
|---|---|
Reduce waste | Identifies idle and underutilized resources |
Improve budgets | Detects rising spend before budgets are exceeded |
Support FinOps | Dashboards and reports for business teams |
Drive optimization | Prioritized cost savings recommendations |
Cloud spend transparency | Spend broken down by service, account, and business unit |
Summary
Using Virtana Cloud Cost Management, teams can quickly spot rising cloud expenses, understand where the costs originate, and determine the reasons behind unexpected increases. With clear visualizations, trend insights, and cost-versus-utilization reporting, both technical and business stakeholders gain the transparency they need to interpret cloud spending and take informed action to optimize costs while supporting overall business objectives.