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Spend Reports

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Spend Reports

You can generate spend reports by navigating to Reporting > Spend Reports. When you create a spend report, easily accessible buttons at the top of the page let you save to your My Saved Reports page, copy the report link, or export to a .csv file.

You can also view reports on individual resources by selecting the appropriate tabs on their details page. For example, to view the spend report for an account, navigate to Accounts > All Accounts, click on the account, and select Spend Reports. 

Report Criteria

Spend data type.

NOTE: Only Billed spend data is available for Billing Sources using AWS Detailed Billing Reports. These Billing Sources will report Billed spend regardless of the data type selected.

  • Billed. The billed (invoiced) amount is shown for each funding source. Commitment charges are shown at the funding source level. This view is useful if you want to see spend represented the same way that you see it on your financial invoice.
  • Amortized and Attributed (AWS Only). With amortized billing, upfront costs for the resources you purchased are distributed across the term of the plan (the commitment period). In most cases, this is on a recurring monthly basis. This attributed view provides vertical financial data through your organization chart by attributing spend to accounts linked to the billing source based on their effective resource consumption. This view is useful if you have set up budgets at the project level.
  • Amortized (AWS Only). With amortized billing, upfront costs for the resources you purchased are distributed across the term of the plan (the commitment period). In most cases, this is on a recurring monthly basis. This unattributed view provides horizontal financial data across your organization chart, showing spend at the parent, billing account where the resources were purchased, not on the linked accounts. This view is useful if you track spend at the top-level OU or funding source level.
  • List. The on-demand list prices for resources are shown. This does not reflect any discounts or price variances. This view is useful if you want to reduce end-user visibility into the discounts your organization receives.

Dimension. Spend reports can be generated for OUs, projects, accounts, services, resources, billing sources, funding sources, and cloud providers. You can also create custom reporting dimensions by using labels and cloud provider tags.

Deduct credits. Credits are adjustments that are applied to your account to cover eligible service costs. This can include promotional, purchased, and other granted credits.

Deduct refunds and discounts. Refunds can occur when a billing report is updated after finalizing your bill for the previous month. Discounts include reductions to your rate that are applied during a given billing period. Some discount examples are reservation discounts, committed use discounts, and savings plan discounts.

If you use a relative time frame (e.g. last 6 months) and save the report, the report will automatically update with the most up-to-date information every time it is viewed.

Forecasting

Starting with Kion 3.14, Forecasting is now embedded into spend reports and is no longer a financial setting to toggled on or off. Additionally, Estimates has been sunset with 3.14 and will no longer be used for projecting spend or triggering enforcements.

Within spend reports, forecasting can be toggled on from the top left corner of the spend graph. The toggle on will immediately kick off a forecast request based on your current timeframe selection. Below is an overview of how the forecast works with various timeframes:

  • This Calendar Year, This Month, and This Quarter - Forecasting toggled on will automatically fill in for the canned timeframe. For example, if it is Feb. 25th and “This Quarter” is selected and forecasting is turned on, the forecast will populate Feb 25th - Mar 31st.
    • This is the same behavior for Custom date ranges as well; forecasting will fill in the future dates selected.
  • Any “Last” timeframe (ex: Last 6 Months) will default to +1M upon toggling forecast on.
    • When forecasting is toggled on, four canned timeframes will appear for quick adjustments as needed (+1M, +3M, +6M, +12M).
    • The current month does not factor into the canned timeframes and will always have the rest of it’s spend forecasted. If it’s August 15th, forecasting will default to forecasting August 16th - end of September.
    • For a timeframe like Last Quarter, if you are currently in the middle of the next quarter, the actuals will adjust to accommodate the current month +1M default forecast. For example, if it’s currently August and my timeframe is “Last Quarter” with forecasting toggled on, the graph will now show Apr-Aug spend, while forecasting the remainder of August + September.

Kion offers custom forecast settings located within the gear icon to the right of the forecast toggle on the spend graph. Within these settings, users have two customizable options:

  • Look back Period - Users can customize the timeframe the forecast data is based on. A canned time frame or a custom time frame are both supported. The selections made here dictate how data is generated, regardless of the timeframes selected on the spend report.
    • Example - If a team has recently optimized their spend over the last 30 days, a custom look back period of 30 days can be selected in order to generate a new forecast for the team’s spend.
    • The look back period is capped to 14 months at this time.
  • Growth Prediction - Users can add a manual input for additional growth (or optimizations) on top of Kion’s forecasted spend. These inputs are expected to be a percentage. Users should use this to predict known increases/decreases in spend that would not be detected in previous data the forecast is built upon. The multiplier will impact the 2nd forecasted month and onwards, allowing it to be based off the 1st month as a baseline.

Additional Callouts:

  • Kion’s forecasting method is driven by a triple exponential smoothing model to capture both seasonality and expected trends. Please note, this model only applies to future months, and the current month uses the actuals of the current month to predict the remaining days of the month.
  • Forecasting queries run separate of spend report queries; this means a spend report will run first independently, and then forecasting will kick off.
  • Forecasting works with any spend data type and will run based on what is selected.
  • Forecasting for credits and refunds runs separately of spend data. This allows users to deduct or not deduct these items into their forecasts depending on preference. Additionally, the growth multiplier does not apply to credits, refunds, or discounts.
  • When dimensioned on “None”, forecasting will present error bars to represent the Mean, Max, and Min. Max and Min error bars are only available when no dimension is selected.
  • Saved Reports - Users can save reports with forecasting enabled. Upon opening the saved report, forecasting will rerun based on the settings. Additionally, these reports can be added to the home dashboard in the same manner reports are added today.
  • Forecasting is no longer supported on the project details tab, but customers should expect it to be added back and improved in a future release.

Reporting with Labels

Labels group objects together, making it easy to find information and create reports on related items, regardless of where they fall in your organization structure. Labeling objects makes it easy to search, filter, and report on any attribute that is important to your organization.

Some helpful labels for reporting that you may want to set up include:

  • Cost center
  • Department
  • Environment
  • Owner

For information on creating and applying labels, see What is a Label?

Reporting with Cloud Provider Tags

Kion can create reports using tags you have configured in your cloud provider's console. Applicable tags are automatically recognized in your billing data and made available in the report dropdown menus.

Kion supports reporting on tags within AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. If you're using more than one of these cloud providers, you can take advantage of Kion's unified tagging. For more information, see Reporting with Tags.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags

AWS cost allocation tags give you the ability to drill down on resource-level spend. In order to use tags, they must first be enabled in the Billing and Cost Management console within AWS.

To learn how to enable cost allocation tags, see Amazon's article Activating User-Defined Cost Allocation Tags. Once they are enabled, your selected tags and values are automatically added as options within Kion reporting dropdown menus.

Service Category

With Kion 3.14, Service Category is offered as a spend report dimension and filter. This aligns with the FOCUS specification as an additional report offering. For customers using a FOCUS export from the cloud providers, this dimension will match the service mapping from the providers. However, please note, the providers can make changes to categories or have services unmapped in the interim.

For customers not using FOCUS exports, Kion has a manual mapping of services to support the dimension no matter the export file. However, because there is not a public listing or defined mapping at this time, there may be inconsistencies or errors. If a service changes categories or if a service was only used in historical months, customers may need to reprocess for accurate mapping. Services that exist in the current month and going forward will automatically align to a Service Category.

See the below file for Kion's current mapping of Services to Category across provider.

Lastly, Kion was unable to map OCI services in a way that would be consistent for customers and will only support this dimension for customers using the FOCUS export with OCI. The proprietary OCI export will show all services as "Other".