Improve FinOps predictability with Anodot Forecast

With Anodot, FinOps teams can create accurate multi-cloud cost forecasts, monitor budget adherence, and generate ad-hoc forecasts instantly.

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Forecasting is a key part of FinOps

Cloud costs are notoriously hard to forecast and budget due to their volatility. Forecasting tools typically rely on the previous month’s cost data to produce end-of-month forecasts, allowing you to catch budget increases in the current month only. They don’t account for the cloud’s ability to adjust automatically as work demands change. 

An accurate forecast needs granular historical data, advanced machine learning that can handle influencing factors such as trends, seasonality, special events, and anomalies—as well as inputs regarding ‌business changes and future infrastructure/application plans.

Anodot’s market-leading forecasting technology provides FinOps teams with a near-perfect 30-day forecast at any granularity, as well as daily and total budget period forecasts, enabling them to adapt quickly to changing conditions.

Accurate forecasts you can count on

Anodot Forecast is designed for business users—it’s completely autonomous, flexible, granular, and uses machine learning to handle a lot of forecasting tasks without data science intervention.

More importantly, it is accurate. Anodot’s median monthly forecasting accuracy is 98.5%, as measured by Mean Absolute Percentage Error, a standard industry metric.

Monitor forecasts and budgets together

Anodot’s Cloud Budget Monitoring is designed to address the challenges associated with managing cloud costs in dynamic and ever-evolving multi-cloud environments. 

Budget Monitoring consists of four key components:

  1. Monitoring: Set and monitor granular budgets on daily, monthly, and total budget period basis
  2. Forecasting: Create accurate forecasts at any granularity
  3. Reporting: Track and analyze actual vs. budgeted vs. forecasted costs
  4. Alerting: Get notified of overspending or forecast variances in real-time

Generate ad-hoc forecasts with CostGPT

CostGPT, Anodot’s generative-AI FinOps assistant, can instantly analyze your cloud spending, provide clear visualizations, generate insights, and solve common FinOps challenges. It also remembers and learns from previous questions, recommending relevant questions.

CostGPT Forecasting adds another layer of insight. Allowing you to generate ad-hoc forecasts for any cost-related questions that you have using the vast historical data available within Anodot.

Are you able to forecast cloud costs accurately?

According to the 2024 State of FinOps Report, nearly two-thirds of respondents have organizational attention or focus on them for improvement in three areas: budget granularity and communication, forecast accuracy, and budget adherence.

Getting the most out of your cloud investment requires accurate forecasting and budgeting. An organization that can accurately predict its cloud spending will be in a better position to take advantage of the myriad resources and tools available from public cloud providers. 

 

Predictability also allows leaders to let engineers experiment and innovate, resulting in better business outcomes. However, many organizations still need to significantly improve their forecasting capabilities.

Evaluate your FinOps forecasting capability

Identify your forecasting maturity by asking yourself the following questions:

  1. Is there enough granularity in your forecasts? 
  2. Can you accurately forecast costs by cloud, business unit, product, service, or team?
  3. Can you generate accurate daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly forecasts?
  4. How flexible is your forecasting? Are you able to adapt your forecasting to changes as they occur (e.g., trends, seasonality, special events, robustness to anomalies, or new business context such as new customers or new RI agreements)?
  5. Are your forecasts used to allocate accurate budgets at the required granularity? Do you communicate and analyze budgets on a regular basis?
  6. Do you measure and track forecasting accuracy? What is the variance between your forecasts and actual costs? 
  7. In addition to budgeting, are forecasts used for long-term financial planning, monitoring costs in the short-term, and proactive FinOps?

Are you still struggling to forecast despite using multiple FinOps tools?

Accurately forecast your multi-cloud costs with Anodot

Find out how Anodot cloud cost management can support your FinOps strategy.
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