Getting Started with Financial Management

Everyone budgets cloud spend differently. From simply aggregating spend to enforcing thresholds and budget allocations, we offer the flexibility to create a financial management structure that perfectly suits your organization.

With Kion, budgets aren’t static. They adapt and change. When working in the cloud, you track progress, measure variation, and make updates. Your budgets should work the same way. We make financials easy to analyze and adjust at the OU or project-level along any timescale you need.

Budgets are enabled by default when you first install Kion. If you started using Kion before budgets were released in version 3.5.0, you can migrate from spend plans to budgets. For more information, see Migrating from Spend Plans to Budgets.

Building your Financial Management Structure

Kion offers a modular approach to financial management. We offer many tools for various use cases, and you can choose which ones you would like to use. The way you configure these tools will move your financial management towards a more or less restrictive structure. Each tool can be used alone or in combination with any other.

You can use these example management structures as start points for selecting your tools based on the level of control you need. If you adopt a non-restrictive management structure without using any additional financial tools, you can still track and view data visualizations of your spending.

Where does your money come from?

Funding Sources

Funding sources represent streams of money in your organization. They are commonly used to represent corporate budgets, contracts, or grants. Funding sources can be available for use by all projects in the organization or limited to specific OUs only.

Depending on the level of control you need, you can choose to enforce the use of funding sources on all of your project budgets. Enforcing funding sources can be useful if you don't want to use allocations, but still want to use funding sources or attribute spend to a specific bucket of money.

If you choose not to use funding sources, your accumulated spend will still be totaled and calculated against any OU thresholds or budgets you have created.

For more information, see What is a Funding Source?

Where is your money going?

Project Budgets

A project budget is a way to track and estimate spending from the project level. With budgets, you can set funding values on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, or custom basis. You can also create fixed or cumulative budgets, based on how you want to plan your spending.

Project budgets and OU thresholds can be used together or separately, depending on the level of planning you need.

For more information, see What is a Project Budget?

OU Financial Thresholds

An OU financial threshold is a way to track and estimate spending from the OU level. They are set on OUs and represent the maximum cumulative spend by projects descending from that OU. You can set amounts per month and view aggregate descendant project spending.

Thresholds can be used with or without project-level budgets. When used alone, they are useful for monitoring project spend at a high-level without setting up individual project budgets. You may want to take this approach if you don't want to monitor individual projects, but you do want to control what they spend cumulatively.

For more information, see What is an OU Financial Threshold?

Allocations Mode

When using funding sources with budgets, you have the option of enabling allocations mode. When using spend plans, allocations are always enabled. When allocations are enabled, your entire organization must use funding sources to allocate funds to OUs and projects. Allocations offer a high level of restriction and control over your funds.

For more information, see Allocations Mode.

How do you control spend?

Financial Enforcements

Project budgets and OU thresholds include notifications when resources overspend. With enforcements, you can automate what remediation action should be taken when one of those notifications is triggered.

When you have financial enforcement actions configured, you get:

• Visual indicators to automatically alert users of excess spending.
• Automated actions to freeze spend or downsize instances.
• Workflow integrations to request funds and perform other custom actions.

For more information, see What is a Financial Enforcement Action?

How can you improve your spend?

Savings Opportunities

Kion's cost optimization features continually scan your environment, helping identify opportunities to save on your cloud bill.

When you have savings opportunities enabled, you get:

• Built-in checks to identify over provisioned and unused resources to rightsize or decommission.
• Multi-faceted views of savings findings to help you analyze your spend and find ways to improve cost efficiency.

For more information, see What is a Savings Opportunity?