microsoft / microsoft/finops-toolkit

Provide Actual Cost Savings for Rightsizing Recommendations in FinOps Hub

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Tool: FinOps hubs Tool: Power BI Type: Feature 💎
Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
603
Forks
249
Avg merge
7d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
11

Description

📝 Scenario

Currently, Azure Advisor displays cost savings for rightsizing recommendations based on Azure retail prices. While this gives a general indication of potential savings, it does not reflect the actual financial impact in environments with Reserved Instances (RIs), Savings Plans, or custom-negotiated pricing. This limits the accuracy and effectiveness of cost optimization efforts, as stakeholders are unable to prioritize rightsizing actions based on real monetary benefit.

For example, a recommendation to downsize a VM might show $100/month in savings based on retail pricing, but in reality, due to RIs or EA discounts, the actual savings might be significantly lower—or even negligible—making the recommendation misleading or inactionable.

💎 Solution

Introduce reporting enhancements in FinOPs Hub optimization engine reports that overlay actual effective cost data onto rightsizing recommendations. This would enable FinOps teams to assess the true cost impact of rightsizing actions by comparing the effective cost of the current SKU with that of the recommended SKU, side by side with the retail-based estimate.

📋 Tasks

### Required tasks
- [ ] TODO: Add tasks
### Stretch goals



ℹ️ Additional context

Reporting Layer Enhancement
Introduce a new column in rightsizing recommendation reports showing "Estimated Actual Savings":
Effective Cost (Current SKU) - Effective Cost (Recommended SKU)
Maintain the existing "Retail Savings" column for comparison and transparency.

Visual Indicators
Use color-coding or icons to highlight recommendations where actual savings differ significantly (e.g., more than 20%) from retail savings.

Filters and Prioritization
Add filtering and sorting capabilities based on actual savings impact, allowing users to focus on the most meaningful optimizations.

🙋‍♀️ Ask for the community

We could use your help:

  1. Please vote this issue up (👍) to prioritize it.
  2. Leave comments to help us solidify the vision.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the FinOps Hub optimization engine's rightsizing recommendation reports and the sources for effective cost, current SKU, recommended SKU, and retail savings data. Define the reporting, visual indicator, filtering, and sorting requirements before implementation; done means actual savings appear alongside retail savings and can be used for prioritization.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
azure
Domain
analytics, cloud
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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