Cloud Cost Management overview

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Cloud Cost Management overview

    The Cloud Cost Management overview provides a modernized, user-friendly interface for ServiceNow customers to effectively monitor and manage cloud spending. It simplifies the experience by presenting key metrics and insights on cloud resource costs, budgets, savings opportunities, and alerts. This overview is essential for understanding cloud expenditures over the last 30 days and forecasting future costs, helping customers optimize their cloud investments.

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    Note: Users with the insightsowner role see only the accounts assigned to them in filters and data views.

    Key Features

    • Spend Insights: View actual and forecasted cloud spending over customizable periods (up to 12 months), broken down by provider, service category, service account, cloud service, or purchase option.
    • Budget Tracking: Track total budgets tied to service accounts or cloud assets and compare forecasted spending against budgets.
    • Savings Analysis: Understand potential and actual savings through recommendations and savings breakdowns by provider, service category, and environment.
    • Spend Analytics: Analyze top spend trends grouped by multiple dimensions such as service category, cost center, and business service to identify cost drivers.
    • Alerts and Recommendations: Receive actionable alerts on failed billing or price sheet downloads, job failures, and details on declined or failed cost-saving recommendations.
    • Recommendation Types: Includes Business hour recommendations to power off resources during off-hours, Reservation/Saving plans suggestions to leverage discounts, Rightsizing advice to address over-provisioning, and identification of unused resources.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    ServiceNow customers can leverage this overview to gain comprehensive visibility into cloud costs and optimize resource usage by applying actionable recommendations. The ability to filter and group spending data by various categories enables targeted analysis and budgeting. Alerts ensure timely identification of issues that may impact cost management accuracy. By following recommendations, customers can realize cost savings and improve cloud resource efficiency.

    The interactive components, such as navigating from monthly spend breakdowns to detailed spend analytics, facilitate deeper investigation and decision-making. Tagging environments as Production or Non Production further enhances savings visibility across deployment contexts.

    Enhance your experience by using the modernized and user-friendly Cloud Cost Management overview. This simplified overview page helps you use the Cloud Cost Management application more effectively by reducing complexity.

    Important:
    If you have the insights_owner role, only the accounts that are assigned to you appear in the filters and data.
    Use the Cloud Cost Management overview to,
    • Understand how you currently spend on cloud resources or service accounts for the last 30 days.
    • Gain insights into key metrics such as the total budget and potential savings for your cloud resources.
    • Analyze your spend breakdown and group your results by provider, service category, service account, cloud service, or purchase option. You can also sort your results by months past such as 3, 6, 9, or 12 months, actual cost or amortized cost, and by hiding or showing the future cost.
      Note:
      You can view the forecast grouped only by provider or service account.
    • View cloud spending analytics based on provider, service category, and cloud service.
    • Get information about the top spend trends that are grouped by service category, cloud service, cost center, business service, and provider.
    • Understand your savings breakdown by viewing your potential and actual saving.
    • Get actionable insights into your cloud resources through alerts and recommendations.
    Cloud Cost Management overview in the Workspace.
    Table 1. Cloud Cost Management Workspace metrics
    Report Description
    Total spend this month Actual spend on your service accounts or cloud resources for the last 30 days.

    The Forecasted spend this month amount displays the total future spends for all your cloud assets.

    The Compared to last month percentage amount shows the spend difference of the current month and last month.
    Total budget Total budget of your service accounts or cloud assets where the current date falls between the start date and end date of the budget.

    For a budget owner, the budget for only the created policies is displayed.

    The Forecasted variance amount shows the budget amount based on the spend on your cloud resources, which is 
    Forecasted spend this month - Total budget
    .
    Total potential saving Total saving for your cloud assets based on all the recommendations that you haven't acted on.
    Monthly spend breakdown Monthly spend breakdown grouped by provider, service category, service account, cloud service, or purchase option. The results can be sorted by time range and cost type. Use the Show forecast toggle switch for hiding or showing the future cost.

    Selecting a monthly spend breakdown bar navigates you to the Spend analytics page. For more information, see Spend analytics.
    Table 2. Top spend trend
    Report Description
    Top spend trend Spend trend or actual cost grouped by service category, cloud service, cost center, business service, and provider.
    Table 3. Actual vs potential savings
    Report Description
    Actual vs potential savings grouped by provider, service category, and environment Actual vs potential savings grouped by provider, service category, and environment.
    Note:
    To view the Actual vs potential savings grouped by environment chart, you must create tag categories as Production and Non Production. For more information about creating a tag category, see Create and update a tag category.

    Potential saving indicates the total spend on your cloud resources that could be optimized by the recommendations.

    Actual saving indicates the total savings achieved by following the recommendations to optimize your cloud resources.
    Table 4. Alerts
    Note:
    The alerts that you view on the Cloud Cost Management Overview page are for the last one week.
    Alert Description
    Last <provider> billing download job failed The billing download job that downloads organizes, and stores billing data for your payer account has failed.
    Last <provider> price sheet download job failed The price sheet download job that download and stores price sheet data for your cloud provider has failed.
    Scheduled jobs failed One or more scheduled jobs, which automate processes for cloud providers have failed.
    <Number> declined recommendations Number of recommendations that you’ve declined, which indicates potential savings.
    <Number> failed recommendations Number of recommendations that have failed, which indicates potential savings for your cloud resources.
    Table 5. Recommendations
    Recommendation Description
    All Displays all the recommendations that Cloud Cost Management provides for your cloud assets.
    Business hour The Business hour recommendation helps you identify resources that are running when they should be powered off.
    Reservation/Saving plans The reservation and saving recommendation helps you identify resources that would save you money with reservation plans or saving plans.

    You can accept or decline the reservation and saving recommendation.
    Rightsizing The Rightsizing recommendation helps you identify the users, user groups, or locations that are wasting money by running over-provisioned or underused resources.

    You can schedule the rightsizing processes and specify the amount of potential rightsizing savings that triggers notifications.
    Unused The Unused recommendation helps you identify the unused resources.

    You can schedule unused machines to be powered off or terminated.