I'm managing several customer environments as part of my role at a Cloud Service Provider. Recently, one of my customers has been hit with a much higher than expected monthly spend forecast. When I checked the 'PURCHASE' charge type, which typically focuses on Reserved Instance (RI) purchases that occur mainly at the start of the month, I noticed these purchases are being forecasted to repeat 4 or 5 times within the month. In contrast, the usage charges under the 'USAGE' filter remained consistent with previous months. I've also observed similar odd RI behavior in other customer accounts, leading me to suspect that Microsoft may have altered the way RI costs are calculated in their analysis tools. I've reached out to the Microsoft CSP support team, but I haven't made much progress yet. Is anyone else experiencing unusual forecasts or discrepancies due to VM Reservations when analyzing costs, or is it just me?
7 Answers
Glad to find this discussion! I've been diving into the same issues at the CSP subscription level for the last couple of days. 🤦♂️
I've been dealing with this for ages! I'm toying with the idea of putting them in their own subscription just to manage billing better.
Yeah, I've been noticing this too since last month! It really threw me off when all my cost forecasting alerts went off. I've checked with Microsoft and they claim there were no changes made.
Same here. All this CSP billing and RI discrepancies started popping up recently, skewing both billing history and forecasts. So frustrating!
I’ve seen the same strange behavior with CSP subscriptions; it's definitely changed, no question about it.
You might want to switch to the Amortized Cost view in cost management; it smooths out the forecasts a bit. Also, it’s worth checking the RI utilization because underutilization can cause problems like this too.
Totally hear you! It's such a hassle now because they used to bill RIs at the billing profile level, but now they’re showing up as line items at the subscription level, which is so confusing.
Exactly! It's even worse because they went back several months applying this new way of billing RIs at the subscription level, making the whole billing history a mess.
I've switched to amortized costs and it's showing a 'normal' forecast now, but it's still annoying because things weren't like this before. Something has definitely changed lately.