Segment Planner

DevOps and Financial teams have mentioned the challenges of coordinating and tracking the state of longer term infrastructure projects, such as shifting architecture or changing providers against commitment planning. To help with this long term planning we have created the Segment Planner. For the initial launch we are adding in the ability to create Budgets for a segment to track cost against. The Segment Planner also shows actions such as when a commitment purchase was executed, budget was changed, or commitment goal was adjusted.

In upcoming releases, you will be able to see the history of key milestones such as Commitment Purchases or upcoming Renewal Plans and be able to layer additional trends such as commitment coverage.

Creating a Budget and assigning it to current budget,

updates the budget goals in the application.

Budgets will appear in the Segment Dashboard.

Once you have created a budget you can manage it in the Budgets Tab in the Segment Planner. If for some reason you change your budget you can mark it as inactive and create a new active Budget. This allows you to keep track of the history of your budget changes. You can also have multiple budgets active at the same time, for example if you break out quarterly or yearly budgets you can build one of these upcoming budgets and make it active when its approved.

We have added the ability to generate quick cost forecasts for a segment. For example, you could quickly model scenarios where you have a 10% increase or 20% decrease in customer usage for an API, service, or product based on your business and see how that would impact your infrastructure costs. Scenario Forecasting is in alpha so contact us support@archera.ai if you’re interested in trying it out.

Click Add a Forecast to create a quick forecast using cost information.

Items Marked as Visible appear on the Segment Planner Page, Items marked as Pinned show up on all dashboards.

Pinning a Forecast adds it to the Cost Summary and Cost Forecast Cards

Included Series

Forecasts by default use all Cost Data, you can remove some with Series.

Historical

This is the look back window for the forecast. If you had a major inflection point in your costs recently it might be better to set the lookup to start with more recent months.

Forecast

This is how far out you want the forecast to be created. The longer the Historical Lookback window the more accurate this will be for seasonality and other factors.

Monthly Trend

This is a quick multiplier on the trend to see what the impact would be from a 10% increase or decrease on the business. This is similar to a quick back of the sheet calculation. For more accurate forecasting we are adding in a Catalog service.