Dashboard: Cost Trends, Budgets, and Savings

Overview

The Spotto Dashboard is a customizable Azure cost optimization dashboard that helps you understand cloud health and optimization opportunities at a glance. It combines cost trends, recommendations, and well-architected signals into a shareable view you can tailor for different audiences (FinOps, Security, Platform).

If you’ve ever had a “why did the bill jump?” conversation, this page is for you.

Short walkthrough of creating and customizing a dashboard.

Feature overview

Dashboards in Spotto are company-scoped collections of widgets. You can create multiple dashboards (for example, “Finance Overview”, “Security Posture”, “Ops Daily”) and switch between them without re-building filters every time.

Widgets can show trends such as:

• Month-by-month total spend to spot growth and seasonal patterns.
• Daily spend over the last 30 days to catch changes early (new resources, scale events, misconfigurations) before they impact the bill.
• Well-Architected pillar coverage via a radar/spider chart (Cost, Operational Excellence, Reliability, Performance, Security, Compliance).
• Cost optimization opportunities and potential savings derived from recommendations.
• Spend change drivers between months using a waterfall chart.
• Budget tracking (using your configured budgets where available, or an estimated baseline when budgets aren’t present).
• Impact vs effort analysis via bubble charts to help prioritise which recommendations to tackle first.

Why use this? (Jobs, pains, gains)

Jobs to be done

• When spend changes, I want to see where it changed and when, so I can explain variance and act early.
• When there are many recommendations, I want to prioritise by impact, effort, and savings, so work goes to the right team first.
• When leadership asks “are we improving?”, I want a repeatable view of cloud health, so I’m not hand-stitching charts from three different tools.

Common pains

• Cost, recommendations, and posture signals are scattered across different screens and tools.
• It’s easy to notice a problem after month-end, not when it starts.
• Recommendation backlogs are noisy and hard to translate into business value.
• Different personas (Finance vs Security vs Platform) need different answers from the same dataset.

What you gain

• Faster “what changed?” answers using monthly trends, daily trends, and waterfall drivers.
• Clearer prioritisation using savings KPIs and impact/effort visuals.
• A shared, company-scoped dashboard you can reuse in meetings, reviews, and incident follow-ups.

Key capabilities

Use the Priority Dashboard

Choose Priority Dashboard from the dashboard selector when the question is “what needs attention first?” It is a focused, automatically assembled view rather than a saved custom dashboard. Use the Portal header's Focus selector to tailor it for FinOps, Security, Operational Health, Optimization Delivery, or Service Delivery.

Work-theme actions for cost recommendations, resource hygiene, backup, and security can open the matching track under Highest-impact priorities on the Kanban Board. The link preserves the selected subscription scope and reveals the relevant track. It does not accept a recommendation or create tracked work by itself.

The surfaces answer different questions:

• Priority Dashboard: Which domain needs attention?
• Highest-impact priorities: Which concrete work should we consider now?
• Team board: What have we committed to deliver?

Create and manage dashboards

• Create new dashboards (name + optional description).
• Duplicate a dashboard to use as a starting point for another persona.
• Switch dashboards from a selector (default dashboards are highlighted).

Scope by subscriptions

Dashboards can be viewed across one or many subscriptions. This is useful when:

• FinOps wants an aggregated view across the whole Azure estate.
• A service owner wants to focus on a single subscription.

tip

If you don’t see data, confirm you’ve selected at least one subscription.

Customize layout and widgets

On desktop, dashboards use a grid layout that supports:

• Dragging widgets into the layout you want.
• Resizing widgets (where supported).
• Adding widgets from the widget library (with previews).
• Resetting the layout back to defaults when experimentation gets out of hand.

On mobile, Spotto shows a fixed, touch-friendly subset of key widgets (no drag/drop).

Want to understand what each tile is telling you? See Dashboard Widgets for a widget-by-widget guide.

Technical reference (what the dashboard uses)

Component	Details
Inputs	Azure subscription spend summaries, billing period and daily cost data, budgets (when available), recommendation summaries, security posture signals (including pillar categorisation).
Outputs	KPI cards, spend trend charts, waterfall charts, radar/spider charts, impact/effort bubble charts, and navigation into deeper views (Recommendations, Resources, Security).
Defaults	Dashboards start with a default widget set; layouts can be reset. When budgets aren’t present, Spotto may show an estimated baseline for tracking rather than leaving the widget empty.

How it differs from Azure-native dashboards

Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor are great at what they do, but they’re typically separated by domain (cost vs recommendations vs security posture). Spotto’s Dashboard is designed to:

• Combine cost + recommendations + posture signals into a single view.
• Help you prioritise work (not just observe metrics).
• Support multiple personas with different dashboards from the same underlying data.

It’s not a replacement for deep provider-native analysis; it’s the overview you use before deciding where to drill in.

How it works (high level)

• A dashboard is a saved set of widget instances and layout positions.
• Widgets render from Spotto’s ingested data for your selected subscriptions.
• Edits to layout and widget configuration are saved so the dashboard remains consistent across sessions.

Troubleshooting

Dashboard is blank or shows “no data”

What you’re seeing: Widgets render empty states or the page shows no content.
Likely causes:

• No subscriptions selected.
• Subscriptions are still syncing or don’t have sufficient data history yet.

How to fix:

1. Select one or more subscriptions in the subscription selector.
2. If a subscription is newly connected, wait for the next successful sync and refresh the page.

Widgets look wrong after editing

What you’re seeing: Widgets overlap, are missing, or the layout feels broken after changes.
Likely causes:

• Layout changes were saved in a bad state.
• A widget was removed and the grid didn’t land where you expected.

How to fix:

1. Switch out of edit mode (to ensure the layout saves cleanly).
2. Use Reset layout to restore the default configuration.

Trend widgets don’t show meaningful charts

What you’re seeing: Spend charts are empty or show flat/partial data.
Likely causes:

• Not enough historical cost data (common for brand-new subscriptions).
• The selected time range (daily/monthly) doesn’t have coverage yet.

How to fix:

1. Confirm the subscription has billing history available.
2. Revisit after additional days/weeks of spend data are ingested.

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