Budget Health

Budget Health Check

Quick answer to the three questions users actually ask about a budget: Am I over? Will I overshoot? Is anything firing?

Steps

1. List Budgets — Call list_budgets with the user's scope.

   • If no budgets exist on the scope, skip to the No budgets found handoff below.
   • If the call returns an access-denied error, the user lacks Cost Management read access on this scope — surface that distinctly rather than reporting it as "no budgets found."

2. End-of-Month Forecast — Call forecast_costs with the same scope. It returns one row per day, each tagged CostStatus Actual or Forecast, and the same date can appear as both. For the month-end projection, take one value per date — the Actual if present, otherwise the Forecast — and sum PreTaxCost. Compare that to the budget amount.

   • No Forecast rows? If the response has only Actual rows, a projection isn't available for this scope — report month-to-date actual and say a forecast couldn't be produced; don't present partial actuals as a month-end projection. This happens on multi-currency scopes (below) and where there's too little history to project.
   • Multi-currency caveat: the Cost Management Forecast API doesn't return a forecast for scopes that span multiple currencies — a management group or billing account can mix, e.g., USD and GBP, in which case the response comes back as Actual-only rows per currency. Re-scope to a single-currency subscription to get a forecast, and never sum across currencies.

3. Current Month Spend — Call query_costs with timeframe=MonthToDate, groupBy=ServiceName, granularity=None for the spend breakdown by service. If it returns no rows (early in the billing cycle, before current-month data is available), say so rather than implying zero spend — optionally repeat with timeframe=TheLastMonth for recent context.

   • Multi-currency caveat: at management-group or billing-account scope, the result may contain multiple Currency values. Group by Currency before summing or comparing — don't combine USD and GBP into one total.
   • Source-of-truth note: for the budget % use list_budgets' currentSpend.amount (this is what Azure evaluates Actual-cost budget alerts against; Forecasted alerts evaluate against forecastSpend). Use the query_costs MTD result only for the service-level drill-down.

4. Active Alerts — Call list_alerts to surface triggered budget or anomaly alerts. Each alert carries a periodStartDate and stays in Active status until dismissed, so the list can include alerts from earlier months. Check periodStartDate: present only current-period alerts as firing now, and label older ones as prior-period history.

Presentation

For each budget, show:

• Budget — Name, amount, time grain, current spend vs limit (amount and %, with currency code — e.g. 1,200 / 2,000 USD (60%))
• Status — 🟢 On Track (<80%) | 🟡 Warning (80–95%) | 🔴 Over/Critical (>95%)
• Forecast — Projected end-of-month spend; will it exceed the limit? By how much?
• Active Alerts — Current-period triggered budget or anomaly alerts (older periods noted separately as history)

Then, briefly: top 3–5 services by MTD spend (from Step 3) so the user can see what's driving the number.

Handoffs

If forecast > budget limit, or if any anomaly alert is firing:

⚠️ Projected to exceed budget by $X (Y%). Want me to investigate the drivers?

I can use the cost-investigation skill to find what's pushing spend up.

If the user says yes, hand off to cost-investigation with the same scope.

No budgets found on the scope:

No budgets are configured on this scope. Without budgets, cost overruns go unnoticed until the invoice arrives.

Want help setting them up? I can use the budget-setup skill to recommend amounts based on your spend baseline and create tiered alerts.

If the user says yes, hand off to budget-setup with the same scope.