Help Center/ Cost Center/ User Guide/ Cost and Usage Forecasting/ Forecasting
Updated on 2024-11-28 GMT+08:00
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Forecasting

Forecasting Accuracy

Forecasting is based on your historical costs and usage on Huawei Cloud. To monitor your budgets, you can enable forecasting to estimate your future costs and usage, and then configure budget alerts based on the forecasts produced. As forecasts are only a best guess estimate of future costs, the forecasted billing amounts may differ from your actual expenditures for each billing cycle.

Forecasts can vary in accuracy. Different ranges of accuracy have different prediction intervals. Huawei Cloud Cost Center provides a prediction interval of 80% for forecasts, indicating that 80% of your actual costs should fall within the prediction interval. The prediction interval depends on the volatility or fluctuation of your historical expenditures. The more consistent and predictable the historical expenditures, the narrower the prediction interval.

Forecasting Method

Huawei Cloud provides different forecasting methods for different cost types and billing modes.
  • Amortized costs of yearly/monthly subscriptions and pay-per-use resources, and original costs of pay-per-use resources: An AI algorithm is used to forecast the costs based on the historical expenditures. If there is not enough historical data, forecasts cannot be produced.
    • Cost data can be forecasted by the day or month only if you have at least 30 days of cost data from the last six months.
    • Costs cannot be forecasted by the hour.
  • Original costs of yearly/monthly subscriptions: Only the costs of active yearly/monthly subscriptions can be forecasted. If the subscriptions expire, forecasts cannot be produced. The forecasting is based on the following assumptions:
    • If you do not choose Non-Renewal Upon Expiration or Change to Pay-per-Use Upon Expiration, resources will be renewed upon expiration.
    • If auto-renewal is enabled and the auto-renewal deduction date is set, expenditures should be paid seven days before resource expiration.
    • If auto-renewal is not enabled, resources will be renewed within the grace period.
    • If resources are to be renewed at a discounted price, the discount for the most recent purchase or renewal will be used.

Constraints

  1. Only the total cost can be forecasted. Costs grouped by summary dimension cannot be forecasted. If you want to forecast the costs of a specific range, set filters to define the range.
  2. Forecasts do not take into account any future changes due to refunds, account adjustments, or master-member account association or disassociation.
  3. If the grace period of yearly/monthly subscriptions ends, forecasts will not be produced for these subscriptions.
  4. Forecasts are produced based on the historical data you specified. Daily forecasts currently do not take into account periodicity (such as renewals) and may differ from the actual data over the forecast period you selected. They are for reference only.
  5. Forecasts are produced based on historical data. If the offering price or commercial discount has changed, the forecasted cost data may differ from the actual data over the forecast period you selected. In this case, forecasts are for reference only.
  6. If you select a specific summary dimension, no forecast data will be displayed in bar charts and line charts. The forecasted total cost will only be displayed in the table.