Argus

Truly control your Microsoft Cloud cost and risk. That's the promise of Argus.

Go through the slides below (click on the images to enlarge) and find out more about the power of Argus.

Financial overview
Get a clear overview of key financial information and KPI's at a glance. Easily find and compare Month-To-Date (MTD), forecast and average daily spend with previous periods. Costs are split to department, workload, resource category, environment/subscription and pay-as-you-go versus committed spend. In this example, it is clear that the organization can improve its environment by setting budgets and to add environment tagging (development, test, acceptance, production) for better cost allocation.
Resource category
Do you want to know which departments are using a specific resource category? Simply drill down to see the details. In this example, it is immediately shown that two departments use Virtual Machines: Engineering and Operations. Their usage is spread across four workloads: the data pipeline, CI/CD infrastructure, web platform and development/test environment. Explore the same data from different perspectives to uncover more insights. Drill down into a workload to see exactly which resources are linked to it, giving you the context you need to identify optimization opportunities.

Procurement recommendation
This example shows a recommendation to purchase an Azure Savings Plan commitment of 27.47 USD per hour. The potential savings adds up to more than 7,500 USD, leaving performance untouched. This recommendation is given because there is a stable baseline in resource usage. Resources which are already on reserved capacity are excluded of course. All justifying metrics used to generate the recommendation are added to it.
Rightzising recommendation
A 5,000 USD cost saving could be realized by downscaling the resource. The recommendation has been made due to consistent low utilization of the resource over time. Implementing it requires relatively low effort, as no new resources need to be deployed. As with every recommendation, all relevant metrics are included, allowing engineers to quickly assess the impact and validity of the recommendation.
Optimization recommendation
One of Argus's unique capabilities is its ability to suggest topology migrations. Rather than only looking to instance size, Argus also considers whether a different resource type could better support the workload. In this example, Argus recommends to look at migrating a highly utilized VM to a VM scale set. This is great example of technical optimization: a VM scale set improves scalability and availability of your application. Of course, an engineer should asses this recommendation to determine the required effort and workload suitability for the proposed architecture.

PAYGO versus Reservation
Use Argus AI to get additional context. The AI agent understands how your environment works and can connect data from different sources, such cost, usage, budgets, workloads and security. This example shows which workloads have the highest spend in the pay-as-you-go model and the percentual spend. In case the workloads allow it, you may consider committing a greater part of your usage by purchasing Reserved Instances or a Savings Plan.

Forecasting
Argus provides instant insight into your forecast. By day, month or for the remainder of the year. In this example, the uncertainty range is narrow. As you look further ahead, the range naturally becomes wider. The forecast automatically adapts to your usage based on machine learning. Scale your resources up or add new workloads, and the forecast adjusts accordingly.
Budgets
Easily set and manage budgets in Argus at workload, department or organizational level. New budgets and changes to existing budgets must be approved by the budget owner before they become active.
Alerts & notifications
Act on unexpected usage and costs before they become a problem. Argus proactively alerts you when anomalies are detected, helping you stay on top of changes as they happen. You can also easily configure which monthly reports you want to receive, so you always have the insights you need.