Spend Monitoring
A traffic-light health view across all connected providers, showing MTD spend vs baseline vs budget at a glance.
What Monitoring is
The Monitoring page gives you a single view of cloud spend health across every provider connected to your workspace. For each provider, StackSpend compares month-to-date (MTD) spend against the historical baseline and the configured monthly budget, then surfaces a traffic-light status so you can see at a glance what is on track, what is trending up, and what has already breached its budget.
An overall summary row at the top rolls all providers into a single total MTD figure, a total projected month-end figure, and a combined status derived from the worst status across all providers.
Traffic-light statuses
| Status | Label | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 🟢 | On track | Spend is within the normal range relative to the baseline and the projected month-end is below budget. |
| 🟡 | Trending high | MTD spend is above the historical baseline, or the forecast suggests month-end spend will approach the budget limit. |
| 🔴 | Over budget | MTD spend has already crossed the monthly budget, or the projected month-end exceeds it. |
Per-provider metrics
Each provider row shows the following columns:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| MTD spend | Total spend from the first of the current month up to the most recent sync. |
| Typical month-end | The historical average final spend for this provider, calculated from completed months. Used as the baseline reference. |
| Projected month-end | The forecast final spend for the current month, extrapolated from the current spend rate. See Forecasting for details. |
| Monthly budget | The configured spending limit for this provider. Click the edit icon to update it inline without leaving this page. |
| Status reason | A short explanation of what drove the current traffic-light status — for example, "Forecast exceeds budget by 12%" or "Spend is 18% above baseline". |
Overall summary
The summary bar at the top of the Monitoring page aggregates across all providers:
- Total MTD — sum of MTD spend across every connected provider.
- Total projected — sum of projected month-end figures across every connected provider.
- Overall status — the worst traffic-light status from any individual provider.
Setting budgets inline
You can set or update a provider's monthly budget directly from the Monitoring table without navigating to Settings. Click the edit icon in the Monthly budget column for any provider, enter the new amount, and confirm. The change takes effect immediately and status colours will update on the next page refresh.
How baselines are calculated
The Typical month-end figure is a rolling average of historical monthly totals for each provider, recalculated automatically after every sync. More historical data means a more accurate baseline — the figure becomes reliable after roughly two full months of data.
- Only completed calendar months are included in the average; the current partial month is excluded.
- The average is recalculated on each sync so it stays up to date as your usage evolves.
- Providers connected less than two weeks ago may show no baseline yet. These providers still appear in the table but their Typical month-end column will be empty until sufficient history is available.
Related
- Budgets — set and manage monthly spend limits per provider.
- Forecasting — understand how projected month-end figures are calculated.
- Alerts & Escalation — get notified when spend crosses key thresholds.