Forecasting the Future Spend

Financial forecasting estimates future financial outcomes using historical data. FinOps teams are tasked with providing near-accurate data on past cloud service usages and charges so that the finance team can incorporate it in their annual spend forecasting exercise. Forecasting allows the finance team to properly allocate the budget for IT. Typically, forecasting is done annually, but for more mature organizations, it is regularly updated monthly or quarterly when there is a change in operations, business plans, or economic conditions. There are various ways in Azure to obtain past and current usage and charges for such services.

The usage dataset can be extremely large and requires proper solutions to obtain, store, model, and query the data. Forecasting based on past usage can be accomplished by Power BI’s native forecasting capabilities, while advanced forecasting by application or business unit requires extra steps to prepare and model the...