Support for Plotting Cost Variation (% or Absolute) in Widget Charts

Request Type: Feature Request

Description:

As a FinOps team member, I want the ability to visualize cost variation—either as a percentage change or absolute value change—rather than only viewing absolute costs on widget charts. This would help me identify significant changes in smaller cost items that might otherwise be hidden due to scale when compared to high-cost services.

Current Limitation:

Today, the widget chart allows selecting various metrics for the Y-axis, but variation over time (absolute or percentage) is not one of the available options. This makes it difficult to detect meaningful changes in lower-cost services or accounts, as their variations are visually negligible next to large cost centers.

Proposed Enhancement:

Add the ability to select the Y-axis metric as:

• Cost Variation (absolute change over a defined period)

• Cost Variation (%) over time

This would enable a more dynamic and actionable view of cost trends, especially in environments with large cost discrepancies between services.

Example Use Case:

Let’s say Service A costs $10,000 and increases by 2%, while Service B costs $500 and increases by 50%. On a traditional cost chart, the 2% change in Service A dominates the visual narrative, while the significant 50% spike in Service B is barely noticeable. With variation-based plotting, these insights become immediately visible.

Benchmark:

DoIT’s Cloud Intelligence platform offers a similar feature. Their “comparative report” view allows cost variation to be plotted and compared easily:

👉 DoIT documentation

Benefit:

This enhancement will allow FinOps teams to better track anomalies, cost spikes, and optimization opportunities regardless of the absolute size of the spend, improving cost governance and proactive remediation.