Flag abnormal spend, predict future costs, & stay on budget

Forecasting cloud spending is a top FinOps priority for 2025. Unexpected cost spikes — or even slow and steady increases — can strain budgets and require time-consuming investigations. Accurate forecasting and anomaly detection are critical to maintaining control and predictability over complex cloud spending.

That’s why we built AI-Driven Forecasting and Cost Anomaly Detection. Engineers can now catch spend anomalies as they happen and see exactly where costs are heading — down to the hour, and by project, team, or client. Empower your team with the data-driven insights you need to anticipate costs, optimize spending, and detect anomalies before they escalate.

What’s New

Starting today, you can access Cost Forecasting & Anomaly Detection in nOps Business Contexts+. This solution leverages advanced AI capabilities to deliver actionable insights tailored specifically to your cost and usage patterns — taking into account seasonal fluctuations, workload variations, and other dynamic changes in behavior. Plan for future costs, optimize spending and detect unexpected cost spikes early.

Intelligent Cost Forecasting

Intelligent Cost Forecasting uses advanced time-series ML analysis to predict future cloud costs based on your historical data. Stay ahead of your budget with projected spend trajectories for each project or client.

This gives engineers immediate visibility into the downstream impact of architectural and usage decisions — helping teams iterate faster without overspending.

Forecasts include detailed trend analysis (direction, strength, change points), seasonality detection (daily, weekly patterns), and period comparisons (e.g., projected next 30 days vs. actual last 30 days) to provide deeper insights.

Cost Anomaly Detection

Sudden cost spikes can quickly lead to runaway spending — from forgotten tests to rogue deployments and misconfigured infrastructure. By the time Finance spots the issue, it’s already too late.

Automated Cost Anomaly Detection automatically identifies unusual spending patterns that deviate significantly from forecasted spending. Now you can:

  • Detect spikes early:Find out early when daily costs deviate significantly from the expected baseline.
  • Trace to business units:See anomalies grouped by billing client, account, and project to identify which teams or workloads are driving the increase.
  • Quantify the impact: Understand the impact with cost deltas, severity estimation (Low, Medium, and High) and percent deviations to prioritize investigation.

Budgets & Cost Tracking

Budgets and cost targets can be set from your existing spend data, or defined manually. Track and monitor your progress, with alerts if spend is trending off course.

Costs are automatically grouped by the dimensions you care about — team, feature, product, customer, environment, SaaS metric, etc.  — so ownership and accountability are clear.

Who is Cost Forecasting & Anomaly Detection For?

According to the State of FinOps 2025, forecasting is among the most adopted capabilities by FinOps practitioners, highlighting its critical role in effective cloud financial management.​ Here’s why it matters to you:

Engineering Manager FinOps Practitioner DevOps Teams
Proactively plan budgets and resources

- See upcoming cost projections to anticipate and allocate budgets more effectively

- Improve cross-team alignment by sharing forecasts and spend insights
Develop and refine cost optimization strategy

- Monitor cost spikes and root causes to prioritize financial risks

- Provide leadership with accurate, data-driven forecasts for cloud spend
Detect and remediate anomalies

- Automatically receive alerts for sudden spikes or usage anomalies

- Quickly pinpoint which workloads or configurations need fixing to avoid runaway costs
Accelerate decision-making

- Use hour-by-hour forecasts to confidently green-light or halt new initiatives

- Avoid last-minute surprises by catching anomalies early and assigning them to the right teams
Promote accountability and transparency

- Track costs at the project, team, or client level for granular financial reporting

- Ensure cloud spend aligns with planned budgets and governance policies
Empower continuous improvement

- Combine forecasts with deployment and usage data to adjust autoscaling, capacity planning, etc.

- Validate that infrastructure or configuration changes yield positive cost impacts
Maintain delivery velocity & budget alignment

- Balance performance needs with cost constraints by understanding future spikes

- Communicate expected spend changes to stakeholders in advance
Leverage advanced AI for deeper insights

- Identify irregular spending behavior beyond simple threshold-based alerts

- Detect seasonality, change points, and longer-term cost trends to guide strategic savings
Enhance incident response

- Prioritize high-severity anomalies (e.g., major cost surges) and keep overall usage stable

- Integrate anomaly data into monitoring workflows for immediate triage and remediation

How to Get Started

Business Contexts+ customers can access Cost Forecasting & Anomaly Detection directly in nOps Business Contexts+. Have questions about Cost Anomaly Detection or Forecasting? Need help getting started? Schedule a demo or reach out to your Customer Success Manager to learn more.

If you’re new to nOps…

nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2+ billion in cloud spend for our customers.

Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo with one of our AWS experts.