Read access
cost:read View cost estimates, billing summaries, showback, anomalies, and invoices.
OPERATIONS / FINOPS
Cost Explorer
Understand cloud spending, estimate infrastructure costs, identify savings opportunities, and reconcile actual billing with attributed resource usage — all from one place.
GETTING STARTED
Open Operations → Cost Explorer for authoritative cloud billing, IaC planning estimates, showback, optimization, and finance reconciliation. Select a Terraform stack, choose a pricing engine, run Scan now, and review rollups across your organization hierarchy — before or after deployment.
Management access
cost:manage Run scans, save schedules, sync billing, reconcile costs, and manage alerts.
Why cost analysis?
Cost analysis shows estimated and actual spend so you can compare options, evaluate rightsizing and commitment purchases, reconcile cloud bills to attributed inventory, and catch budget or anomaly spikes before they surprise finance.
01
Stack-level cost analysis
Estimate infrastructure costs before or after deployment.
In the Stack-level cost analysis section, select a Terraform stack and pricing engine, then run Scan now. Each scan prices all Terraform workspaces in that stack.
Configure recurring scans
Automate cost estimates on a schedule for each stack.
Expand Schedule for <stack> to enable a recurring scan.
Daily Run every day at the configured local time.
Weekly Choose a day of the week and local time.
Monthly Choose a day from 1–28 and local time.
Choose your pricing engine
ALWAYS AVAILABLE
Built-in pricing
Planning-layer cost estimates available without an Infracost integration.
WHEN CONFIGURED
Configured Infracost
Provider-accurate estimates when Infracost is configured under Administration → Integrations → Infracost.
In-app planning totals and estimate counts appear in the stack scan summary. Use the display currency chip in the page header to view amounts in a supported display currency where configured.
02
Overview and monitoring
Important cost information stays visible above the result tabs.
These panels are not separate tabs — they sit above the six result tabs.
Overview hero
Monthly spend, savings opportunity, authoritative versus planning scope, and reconciliation hints.
Alert history
Review recent budget and billing alerts.
Cloud billing
Connect and sync AWS, Azure, and GCP billing sources. View charts and sync run history. cost:manage is required to sync.
Finance reconciliation
Compare cloud bills with attributed spend, investigate variance, and drill into details. Running reconciliation requires cost:manage.
Stack-level cost analysis
Run on-demand scans and configure recurring schedules for Terraform stacks.
Budget and anomaly alerts
Open Budget and anomaly alerts from the overview hero to configure warning and critical budget thresholds, anomaly deltas, and email notifications.
03
How it works
From infrastructure discovery to financial insights.
Axio discovers Terraform resources in the selected stack and, when billing is connected, ingests authoritative cloud usage. Results feed forecasts, showback, chargeback, opportunities, and anomaly detection.
Choose a Terraform stack and pricing engine.
Price each Terraform workspace and/or sync cloud billing.
Consolidate totals by organization, project, workspace, environment, and stack.
Identify savings, commitments, anomalies, reconciliation differences, and chargeback.
04
Page tabs
Explore detailed views of infrastructure spending and optimization.
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | Allocation coverage, budget utilization, savings breakdown, spend by team, top recommendations, cost estimates, and finance trust metrics. |
| Costs | Monthly cost, annual forecast, potential savings, idle resources, cost by Terraform target, optimization recommendations, and cost estimates. |
| Showback | Consolidated spend grouped by dimension from cost estimates or inventory. |
| Opportunities | Commitment recommendations such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, rightsizing, advisor-style opportunities, and optional FinOps remediation tickets. |
| Chargeback | Generate monthly invoices by scope, list invoices, and download CSV exports. |
| Anomalies | Unexpected spend spikes from snapshot comparison, including severity, dimension, source, and status. |
Cost estimates table
The Cost estimates table on Overview and Costs supports cascading filters for organization, project, workspace, environment, and stack. Click a resource count to open resource-level pricing details.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Organization / Project / Workspace / Environment / Stack | Hierarchy attribution from the scanned stack. |
| TF workspace | Terraform workspace name within the stack. |
| Monthly | Estimated monthly cost for that row. |
| Resources | Number of priced resources; click to open the detail dialog. |
| Savings | Potential monthly savings for that estimate. |
05
Cost management capabilities
Scan infrastructure, optimize spend, and support financial reporting.
What you can do
- Scan Terraform stacks on demand or on a Daily, Weekly, or Monthly schedule per stack.
- Switch between Built-in pricing and Configured Infracost when integrated.
- Sync cloud billing connectors and reconcile bills to attributed spend.
- Compare costs against a previous scan baseline, including estimate and per-target deltas.
- Review opportunities for rightsizing, idle waste, commitments, and cloud advisor findings.
- Run Check for anomalies on the Anomalies tab (
cost:manage). - Generate chargeback invoices (
cost:manage) and download invoice CSV files (cost:read). - Create FinOps remediation tickets from opportunities (
cost:manage).
06
Permissions
Access is controlled by organization-level cost permissions.
| Permission | Capability |
|---|---|
cost:read | View Cost Explorer, including billing summaries, reconciliation results, estimates, showback, the anomalies list, and invoice lists and downloads. |
cost:manage | Run stack scans, save scan schedules, sync cloud billing, run reconciliation, generate chargeback invoices, capture anomaly snapshots, acknowledge anomalies, configure alert settings, and create or update FinOps remediations. |
07
Anomalies
Identify unexpected changes in cloud spending.
Detect and investigate spend spikes
On the Anomalies tab, click Check for anomalies to capture a baseline snapshot and compare current spend. This action requires cost:manage.
Open anomalies show severity, dimension, source, previous versus current amounts, and percentage change. Use Acknowledge to close reviewed items (cost:manage).
Recommended starting point
Run at least one stack scan and/or connect cloud billing before relying on Showback, Opportunities, or Anomalies. These views combine scan attribution, inventory, and billing data when available.