Manage Budgets

Introduction to budgets

Administrators can create budgets to control spending for one or more enterprises and providers. The platform evaluates budgets using the daily cost and usage data that it also displays on the Hybrid cloud billing dashboards.

Budgets can trigger action plans when costs pass a certain threshold. A use case for this feature might be “When an enterprise has consumed 50 % of its budget amount in AWS, send an email to the System Administrator.”

Display budgets

To display budgets:

Privileges: Access budgets section, Manage budgets

Go to Control → Budgets
Select the enterprise that the budget was created in OR select All

Create a budget

Before you begin:

Check that you have Hybrid cloud billing dashboards that obtain billing data from the cloud provider. The platform will use the billing data to evaluate the consumption of the budget
- See Dashboard hybrid billing details and for configuration instructions, see Display cloud provider billing data and Configure dashboard display
- The standard billing dashboards support Amazon and Azure, but administrators can push custom billing data for other providers.
Create action plans for your budget to run. See Manage Action Plans

To create a budget:

Privileges: Access budgets section, Manage budgets, View enterprise hierarchy

Go to Control → Budgets
Click the + add button

Enter general information as described here

Field	Description
Name	The name of the budget
Amount	The total amount of the budget and the currency. By default use the currency of the pricing model of the main enterprise. If an enterprise in the hierarchy has a different currency and a conversion_factor enterprise property, perform a conversion.
Start date	Enter the date to activate the budget. If the start date is in the past, the platform will use the past bills stored in the platform (as displayed on the billing dashboard). If the start date does not align with the billing period of the past bills, the platform will not include the time until the start of the billing period. For example, when a provider bills on the 15th day of the month, if you create an annual yearly budget starting from the 1st day of January, the first 14 days of the year will not be included. If the start date is in the future, the platform will update the budget when it registers new billing details for the billing dashboard
End date	Optionally enter an end date
Reset cycle	Select an option to reset the budget after each month, quarter, year, or never. The reset cycle begins at the budget start date. So a budget starting on the 15th day of the month would be reset on the 15th day of the next month

Go to Apply budget and click the + add button to add enterprises and providers that the budget will apply to.

The following table describes how to add enterprises and providers.

Field	Description
Enterprise	Apply the budget to this enterprise. If the user has the privilege to View enterprise hierarchy, then the user can also select enterprises from the scopes beneath their scope in the hierarchy.
Provider	Select the providers. Note that you can select all providers or a specific provider for each enterprise.

Go to Action plans and click the + add button to add action plans.

The following table describes how to add action plans.

Field	Description
Trigger	Enter the percentage of budget consumption that will trigger the action plan
Action plan	Select an action plan to run when the consumption reaches the trigger level. This functionality is designed to make use of the email notifications from action plans but you can select any action plan.

After you add the action plans, to prevent budget actions, select the Mute checkbox

Currency conversions

This feature uses the conversion_factor enterprise property to convert between currencies. You should assign this property to any customer of a reseller that is using a different currency, to enable the conversion to be carried out. If the platform cannot find the conversion factor property, it will use the default value of 1. The platform always uses the latest value of the conversion factor, and it does not store previous values. If you change the conversion factor and update past bills, then the platform will use the latest value to calculate the consumption.

Edit a budget

When you edit a budget, you can change the name, and the amount and currency. You can also change the entities that the budget applies to and the action plans that it will trigger.

Change the elements that a budget applies to

If you add or delete an enterprise, the platform will recalculate the amounts consumed by each enterprise. If you remove an enterprise, the platform will consider the amount already consumed by the enterprise. The platform will exclude the enterprise from the next billing cycle.

Edit action plans and mute notifications

When you make changes to the trigger amount or the action plans, the changes will not take effect until the next time the platform evaluates the amount consumed by the budget.

To stop a budget from sending notifications after you reach a consumption threshold, select the Muted checkbox.

Delete a budget

To delete a budget:

Go to Control → Budgets
Select the budget
Click the trash delete button