Ternary Budgets

Budgets in Ternary are used to define spend targets for specific cloud scopes and monitor actual and projected usage against those targets. They support tracking spend across providers, services, and custom groupings, helping teams identify when costs are trending above expectations.

Budgets also support flexible modeling to account for growth patterns, seasonality, and provider-specific billing structures. Key capabilities include:

Variable budgets, allowing different budget amounts to be defined for each configured period.
Percentage-based increases, enabling consistent period-over-period budget growth modeling.
Historical spend autofill, which pre-populates budget values using past usage data.
Spend trend previews, surfacing historical usage patterns during budget configuration to guide decision-making.
Expanded dimension support, including cloud provider-specific (non-FOCUS) billing dimensions from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Budgets can be configured with thresholds and alerts to notify stakeholders as spend approaches or exceeds defined limits. This allows teams to intervene early, understand which assets are driving variance, and maintain control over cloud costs throughout the budget period.

Budgets can be accessed from the Cost Assist section in the left-hand navigation menu.

How to create a budget in Ternary

Creating a budget in Ternary involves defining the scope of spend to track, setting a target amount, and optionally configuring alerts to monitor budget performance.

Step 1: Define budget details and scope

Define the budget name: Provide a clear, descriptive name that reflects the purpose and scope of the budget. This helps identify and distinguish the budget during monitoring and reporting.
Select the cost measure: Choose the cost measure the budget will track. Budgets can be based on billed cost, which reflects actual invoiced amounts, or effective cost, which accounts for applied discounts and credits.
Choose the cadence and alignment: Choose Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual cadence and Calendar or Fiscal alignment. New budgets use calendar months; Fiscal requires a usable tenant fiscal calendar.
Define the scope: Specify the scope of the budget by selecting one or more groupings and narrowing them down using sub-dimensions. This determines which cloud assets, providers, or environments are included in the budget calculation.

Choose the budget type: Select how the budget amount should be defined.
- Standard: Defines a primary amount for the selected cadence. This budget type supports fixed or variable amounts across configured periods.
- Hierarchical Budget: Hierarchical allocation separately divides each period’s amount across values of one scope dimension.

For variable amounts, choose a starting period and enter each amount within the configured calendar. Auto-Fill suggests editable amounts from a completed baseline; fiscal Auto-Fill requires a completed fiscal baseline. Changing cadence or alignment rebuilds period rows, and incompatible parent or sub-budget alert rules must be updated or removed before saving.

Step 2: Configure alerts and notifications (optional)

Alerts can be configured to notify stakeholders when spend approaches or exceeds defined thresholds.
To configure alerts:

Define a threshold percentage that triggers an alert.
Select an available evaluation period for the budget's cadence, which can include daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly checkpoints.
Use actual spend for shorter-period checkpoints. Projected spend is available only when the alert period matches the budget's own cadence; for example, a monthly budget cannot use projected spend in a daily rule.
Choose Latest or Reference to select the budget amount version used for comparison. Latest uses the latest budget amount version; Reference uses the highlighted reference version. This choice does not select billing-data freshness.

Select tenant users, external email addresses and configured Slack channels as recipients. When a threshold is met, notifications can include email, in-app messages for matched tenant users, and messages to selected Slack channels; there is no separate user-selected delivery schedule. Rules and recipients are optional, so a threshold alone does not choose an audience.

Explicitly selected tenant users are included in the budget-notification audience regardless of their budget-notification preference. All-users recipients and users matched through external addresses are filtered by that preference.

Step 3: Review and submit

Before saving the budget, review all configured settings, including scope, budget amount, and alert rules. Once confirmed, submit the budget to begin tracking spend against the defined target.

How are budgets managed in Ternary

The Budget Management page provides a centralized table view of all configured budgets. It is used to monitor budget performance, assess risk, and take action when spend deviates from planned targets.

The table surfaces key metrics for the budget's evaluated period, including:

Total Amount: The defined budget value for the selected period.
Actual Spend: Spend incurred within the budget's evaluated period.
Projected Spend: Estimated spend for the budget period. Interpret it using the configured cadence and calendar: monthly, quarterly, or annual, including fiscal periods when configured. Detail KPI amounts align to whole cadence periods. For workloads with uneven usage patterns, projections may overestimate or underestimate final spend.
Variance: Calculated as [Projected Spend] – [Budget], this value highlights budgets or scopes that are most at risk of exceeding their limits.

Each budget row includes an ellipsis menu with options to edit, copy, delete, or add the budget to a preferred dashboard for easier monitoring.

Deleting a budget permanently stops its tracking and notifications, removes its dashboard widgets, and removes its budget layers from reports; the reports remain. Review affected dashboards and reports before confirming. The confirmation lists only affected reports you can access; the total count can also include affected reports you cannot access. Provider-managed budgets can be copied but cannot be edited or deleted through general budget actions.

Budgets can be filtered by amount to focus on specific cost thresholds or ranges.

Export budget data

Use the export control above the Budgets table to download the list narrowed by search and budget-amount filters. The CSV includes budget periods, amounts, spend-to-date, projected spend and variance.

For a hierarchical budget, choose Export budget allocations from its row's action menu to download the parent total and allocation breakdown. Use the list export to compare budgets and the allocation export to review how one budget is divided.

Review budget performance

Select a budget to open its detail page. Compare Current period budget, Actual spend to date, Projected period-end spend, and Projected variance, then choose an analysis range within the budget's configured schedule to inspect the spend charts. Check Period and Periods under Configuration for the budget's cadence and schedule; do not assume every budget is monthly.

Over Budget means evaluated actual spend exceeds the budget amount. At Risk means actual spend has not exceeded the amount but projected spend does. Other evaluated budgets are On Track; an unavailable status does not establish that a budget is on track.

For a hierarchical budget, select a sub-budget to inspect that allocation's cards and charts. Use the parent link to return to the whole budget. Edit Budget from a sub-budget edits the parent budget configuration.

The health badge and charts can use different evaluation times or scopes. For fiscal budgets, analysis is limited to the configured fiscal calendar; unavailable values should not be read as zero.

Understand what changed in spend

Use What has changed on a budget's detail page to investigate spend changes. Select a sub-budget first for allocation-specific analysis.

Choose an analysis range within the budget's schedule and check the current and comparison periods shown. For a range covering complete fiscal periods, the comparison uses the preceding equal number of fiscal periods, which can differ in length. Other ranges use the immediately preceding window of the same number of days. Comparison ranges are limited to the configured calendar.

Review New service, Retired service, Usage change, and Commitment & discount to identify increases and decreases and their service contributors. These explain how spend changed between the two periods. Use Projected variance separately to compare expected spend with the budget target.

The section can be absent when attribution or a comparable fiscal window is unavailable; absence does not mean spend was unchanged.

Configure alerts for a sub-budget

Sub-budget alerts have independent rules and recipients; they do not inherit the parent budget's settings. You need permission to update budgets, and the parent budget must not be provider-managed.

Open a hierarchical budget and select the allocation's sub-budget details.
In Alerts, select Configure Alerts, or Edit for an existing configuration.
Set a threshold from 1 through 100 percent, an available evaluation frequency, and actual or projected spend. Projected spend is available only when the rule frequency matches the parent budget's cadence; shorter-period rules use actual spend.
Select Save Alert for each rule, add the intended email recipients or configured Slack channels, then select Save Alerts to save the configuration.

Rules compare against the sub-budget's latest allocation amount. To remove the configuration, remove every rule and recipient, including Slack channels, then select Save Alerts. Leaving only rules or only recipients does not remove it.

Link reports to a budget

Use Linked Reports on a parent budget you can edit to keep supporting analysis alongside its performance details. Select Add and choose a source:

Existing Report: select one or more reports, then select Add [count] to Budget. Reports already linked are excluded from the picker.
External Links: enter a Report name and Report URL, then select Save.

Open a link to view its destination in a new tab. To remove an added link, open its action menu and select Remove Link. This removes the link from the budget. The built-in Budget Report opens Report Builder scoped to the budget and cannot be removed. Sub-budget detail pages do not include this parent-level panel.

What budget views are available in Ternary?

The examples below describe monthly views. For the budget's configured cadence and analysis period, use the detail page described in Review budget performance above.

Daily Trends

The Daily Trends view overlays daily spend patterns across multiple months to help identify how usage behaves over time.

The dark shaded line represents daily spend for the current month.
Lighter shaded lines represent daily spend from previous months, overlaid for comparison.
Hovering over the graph reveals daily spend values across the past six months.

This view helps answer critical questions about workload behavior:

Is spend typically front-loaded, back-loaded, or evenly distributed across the month?
If a budget threshold is crossed early in the month, does it indicate a genuine risk, or is that pattern consistent with historical behavior?

For example, if spend is consistently front-loaded every month, an early spike may not indicate a budget issue. Conversely, a deviation from historical patterns can signal emerging risk.

Current Month

The Current Month view shows how actual and projected spend compares to the defined budget for the ongoing month.

Monthly budget: Displayed as a horizontal blue line, representing the total budget allocated for the month.
Month-to-date (MTD) spend: Shown as a dark shaded area, indicating the actual spend incurred so far in the current month.
Projected end-of-month spend: Represented by a lighter shaded area, calculated using Ternary’s forecast based on current usage trends. The forecast is derived as:

   Current month-to-date spend + (average spend over past 30-days * days remaining in month)

Over-budget indication: A red shaded area appears when actual or projected spend exceeds the defined budget, highlighting potential budget risk.

Monthly Trends

The Monthly Trends view shows how total monthly spend has changed over recent months relative to the defined budget.

This view helps evaluate longer-term spend behavior rather than short-term fluctuations.
It can be used to assess whether budgets remain aligned with actual usage patterns or require adjustment based on sustained trends.

Monthly Trends are commonly used as a reference point during budget reviews and forecasting discussions.