Budgets and commitments, checked every scan

A budget has an amount, a period (monthly, quarterly or annual) and up to ten alert thresholds, each a percentage of the amount. It can cover all spend, or be limited to a service or to AWS or GCP. In the app, a new budget starts with thresholds at 50, 75, 90, 100 and 120%.

Each scan evaluates every active budget against the cost it collected. It records spend so far, the daily burn rate, projected end-of-period spend, the percentage used and the thresholds crossed. The budget is marked on track, at risk when projected spend reaches 90% of the amount, or breached. It is marked not measured instead when, for example, the scan didn’t collect cost for its whole period so far or for an account it covers; it then shows no figures and sends no alert.

The burn rate uses only positive daily spend, so a one-off credit lowers spend so far without dragging the projection down. When the burn rate would cross the budget before the period ends, the evaluation also records the projected breach date.

The Budgets page shows each budget’s status, spend against the amount, the daily burn rate and projected spend, with tabs that separate budgets on track, at risk, breached and not measured.

Budgets use the cost each scan collects: AWS net usage from Cost Explorer, with tax, credits, refunds and bundled discounts excluded, and GCP cost from your billing export. A budget limited to one cloud account counts only that account’s cost. If a scan didn’t collect cost for an account a budget covers, that budget shows as not measured rather than reading low.

The projection is GetFinOps’s own burn-rate calculation. It does not use the Cost Explorer forecast shown in the cost report. Budgets are re-evaluated when a scan runs, so their status reflects the latest scan rather than live spend.

Each scan reads 30 days of Savings Plans utilization from Cost Explorer. It also lists active EC2 Reserved Instances with their instance type, term, payment option and end date. The Commitments page lists your commitments in a table.

This needs the Cost Explorer coverage and utilization permissions and ec2:DescribeReservedInstances on the cross-account role. If one is missing, the scan still completes and that account’s result names the missing permission. An account holding no Savings Plans is recorded as having nothing to measure.

On GCP, GetFinOps reads committed use discount credits from the billing export for the last 90 days, by service and region, and estimates the share of cost they cover. It doesn’t measure how fully each commitment is used.

When Compute Engine spend runs above $500 a month, a finding suggests considering committed use discounts. Its saving figure is a rough estimate, not a quote from Google.

Three kinds of commitment finding appear with your other findings:

• Savings Plans whose combined utilization in an AWS account over the last 30 days is below 70%.
• AWS’s own purchase recommendations for Compute and EC2 Instance Savings Plans and for EC2 and RDS Reserved Instances, each with AWS’s estimated monthly saving for a 1-year, no-upfront term.
• The GCP committed-use suggestion described above.

• It doesn’t send budget alerts to the in-app notification bell, or to a recipient or channel set per budget.
• It doesn’t measure Reserved Instance utilization or GCP commitment utilization.
• Quarterly and annual budgets are measured only in the first month of their period; after that they show as not measured.
• It doesn’t buy, exchange or cancel commitments, and commitment findings are never executed.
• Budgets can’t be limited to a tag.
• Commitment data covers the whole workspace; the account selector doesn’t filter it.