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Budget Tracker

The Budget Tracker at /finops/budgets lets you set monthly cost ceilings per scope (catalog, team, owner, custom tag) and alerts when spend approaches or exceeds the ceiling.

Why budgets​

Without budgets, FinOps is reactive — you find out you're over after the bill. Budgets convert FinOps into a control loop: set a target, watch the burn rate, get paged before the deadline.

Budget structure​

FieldNotes
NameHuman label
ScopeTag filter (e.g. team=sales)
PeriodMonthly / quarterly / annual
AmountCurrency-denominated cap
Soft alert at% of budget (default 50% / 80%)
Hard alert at% of budget (default 100%)
NotifyChannel(s) — Slack, email, PagerDuty

Soft alerts inform; hard alerts page on-call.

Page sections​

  • Active budgets — list with current spend, remaining, days left, projected end-of-period
  • Recently breached — budgets that hit hard threshold this period
  • Watch list — projected to breach by EOP
  • History — past period results (over / under budget)

Each row shows a horizontal progress bar tinted green / yellow / red.

Alerts​

When a soft or hard threshold fires, an alert message includes:

  • Budget name
  • Current spend
  • Threshold
  • Projected end-of-period
  • Top contributors (FinOps's best guess at where to look)

Variance attribution​

Click a breached budget to see what changed:

  • New jobs / queries added in window
  • Existing jobs / queries that grew in cost
  • Recommendation status (any unaccepted recommendations that would have helped)

This is the post-mortem view.

API​

GET   /finops/budgets
POST  /finops/budgets
PATCH /finops/budgets/{id}
GET   /finops/budgets/{id}/variance