Plan with precision and act with confidence using Kion’s enhanced forecasting engine
Kion, the leader in CloudOps and FinOps automation, announced the release of Forecasting 2.0 in Kion version 3.14. This enhanced engine empowers organizations to predict, model, and manage cloud spend with improved clarity. The forecasting engine is embedded directly into Kion’s Spend Reports, offering customers a more intuitive, accurate, and customizable forecasting experience across public cloud and third-party spend.
Forecasting 2.0 eliminates uncertainty in financial planning, providing visibility into future cloud spend while enabling proactive decision-making. Teams can now create forecasts within spend reports, apply user-driven assumptions, and tailor reports to their unique situation.
A Smarter Way to See the Future of Cloud Spend
Forecasting 2.0 introduces a completely re-engineered forecasting engine powered by a statistical model that accounts for seasonality, trend, and variability. This ensures cloud FinOps teams can move from reactive budget management to predictive cloud governance.
The new experience is intuitively embedded into Spend Reports to eliminate additional navigation and improve usability. Users can turn forecasting on with a single click and instantly visualize spend projections, adjusting the time horizon with built-in presets or the ability to entirely customize the time frame. User-driven settings of custom look-back periods and growth modifiers make it simple to test different business scenarios, from rapid growth to optimization-driven cost reduction.
Forecasting 2.0 replaces the legacy “Estimates” feature, now deprecated in Kion 3.14, and integrates directly with the unified spend and governance framework that Kion customers rely on to enforce policies, track budgets, and align financial accountability across the organization.
What’s New in Forecasting 2.0
- Forecasting Embedded in Spend Reports: No more navigating to separate parts of the platform, just toggle on the forecast within your report for instant insights.
- Dynamic Timeframe Support: Whether you’re viewing “This Calendar Year” or “Last 6 Months,” Kion fills in projections intelligently based on your selection.
- Customizable Forecast Settings:
- Look-back Periods (up to 14 months) define the historical data your forecast is based on.
- Growth Predictions let users manually adjust for expected increases or decreases in cloud usage.
- Advanced Forecasting Engine: Powered by a triple exponential smoothing model for high accuracy and adaptability.
- Error Bars for Clarity: When no dimension is selected, mean, max, and min projections display as visual error bars for risk assessment.
- Saved Forecasts and Dashboards: Save reports with forecasting enabled and add them to your Kion home dashboard for continuous tracking.
- Credit and Discount Awareness: Forecasting for credits, refunds, and discounts run separately, allowing teams to model spend with or without financial offsets.
- Continuous Update Cycle: Saved reports with relative timeframes (e.g., “last 6 months”) auto-refresh with current data every time they’re opened.
Why It Matters
As multi-cloud environments expand and costs fluctuate, financial planning becomes increasingly complex. Forecasting 2.0 bridges FinOps and CloudOps, giving teams the ability to forecast not just costs, but the financial impact of operational changes, policy enforcement, and resource scaling, all in one platform.
With Kion’s FinOps+ Platform, organizations can unify governance, automation, and financial management to make FinOps proactive, not reactive. Forecasting 2.0 builds on this foundation by giving teams predictive visibility that helps them stay ahead of spend, maintain budget alignment, and confidently scale across public cloud and third-party applications.
Key Benefits
- Financial Clarity: Move beyond static budgets with predictive insights into upcoming spend.
- Proactive Optimization: Identify trends early to adjust policies, budgets, or architectures.
- Customization: Apply manual growth inputs or optimized look-back windows for precise modeling.
- Governance Integration: Align forecasting with enforcement policies for full FinOps accountability.
- Automation-Ready: Automatically update and visualize future spend as new data arrives.
- Scalable by Design: Works across multi-cloud, multi-org, and spend beyond public cloud.
Future Outlook
As Kion continues to innovate across the CloudOps lifecycle (governance, automation, and financial management), Forecasting 2.0 represents a major milestone in delivering unified, AI-ready FinOps. Future releases will expand forecasting capabilities to better automate project budgeting, introduce enhanced visualization, and AI-driven recommendations.
FAQ
Q: What is being announced?
A: Kion is introducing Forecasting 2.0, an upgraded cloud spend forecasting experience integrated directly into Spend Reports within the Kion FinOps+ platform. It replaces the legacy Estimates feature and provides more accurate, customizable, and actionable spend projections.
Q: Who is this for?
A: Forecasting 2.0 is designed for FinOps and CloudOps professionals, budget owners, and IT leaders managing cloud spend across their multi-cloud environments or third-party applications. It’s ideal for organizations looking to forecast cloud costs with accuracy, incorporate manual growth inputs, and visualize spend trends across multiple business units or funding sources.
Q: How does it work?
A: Forecasting 2.0 leverages a triple exponential smoothing model to forecast spend based on historical data and trend analysis. Users can toggle forecasting directly within Spend Reports, define look-back periods (up to 14 months), and apply manual growth rates to simulate future changes. Forecasts can include or exclude credits, refunds, and discounts, and results update dynamically based on timeframes or dimensions.
Q: Will this work with my current Kion license?
A: Yes. Forecasting 2.0 is available to all customers under their existing Kion license. No additional purchase or activation is required.
Q: What benefits will this feature unlock?
A:
- Improved accuracy in cloud budget planning
- Scenario modeling for growth or cost optimization
- Automated, continuously updated financial projections
- Greater visibility into future multi-cloud spend
- Integration with governance and enforcement for proactive FinOps
Q: How does this compare to other cloud forecasting tools?
A: Many FinOps tools only support forecasting for public cloud spend (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc..), Kion’s forecasting engine supports spend data from third-party applications such as MongoDB or Databricks, allowing organizations to forecast all of their technology spend.
Q: Where can I learn more or try this out?
A: Learn more about Forecasting 2.0 and other FinOps innovations at kion.io or request a demo today to see how Kion can help your organization plan cloud spend with confidence.
Kion – The FinOps+ Platform
Kion unites governance, automation, and financial management across cloud environments, empowering organizations to securely operate with confidence and efficiency. With features like Forecasting 2.0, Kion continues to set the standard for predictive, policy-driven FinOps.
→ Learn more or schedule a personalized demo at kion.io/demo
