Cloud Cost Anomaly Investigation
Design an investigation workspace that connects an unexpected cloud spend increase with services, owners, and reversible actions.
The brief
Understand the problem
Background
A cost spike may come from real demand, a pricing change, duplicate resources, data transfer, or delayed billing records. Immediate shutdown can harm customers, while waiting can rapidly increase spend.
User context
FinOps analyst Rae sees daily storage costs rise forty percent. The increase is concentrated in one region after a backup policy change, but invoice data is still incomplete.
Product problem
Investigators need to understand magnitude, confidence, contributing dimensions, and service ownership before recommending a response.
Objective
Create anomaly summary, cost decomposition, owner collaboration, and action review for one cloud-spend incident.
What to design
Define the experience
Required experience
- Assess anomaly size, timing, and data completeness
- Break cost down by service, region, account, and tag
- Contact the responsible owner with evidence
- Approve a safe mitigation and track realized savings
Screens and states
- Cost anomaly overview
- Cost decomposition
- Owner investigation
- Mitigation review
Core user flow
Follow the critical path
- 01
Rae opens the storage anomaly and checks billing freshness
- 02
She narrows the increase to backup replicas in one region
- 03
The service owner confirms a policy misconfiguration
- 04
They reduce retention for new copies and monitor cost without deleting protected backups
Product rules
Requirements and constraints
Requirements
- Show actual, expected, forecast, and data-completeness states
- Support dimension comparison without double counting
- Link resources to accountable owners and recent changes
- Estimate action impact and identify operational risk before execution
Constraints
- Billing data may arrive late or be revised
- Cost controls cannot directly delete resources from the investigation view
- Shared-cost allocation rules must be visible
Reality check
States worth considering
Ready-to-use content
Mock data
Use this content to test hierarchy and realistic data states. You can expand it when the concept needs more depth.
Cost dimensions
- Object storage: plus $8,420
- Region ap-southeast-1: 78 percent of increase
- Backup replicas: 12,600 new copies
Data status
- Usage through 10:00 UTC
- Invoice estimate 82 percent complete
- Next refresh in 45 minutes
Finish line
What to deliver
- Four desktop screens from uncertain anomaly through verified mitigation
Optional direction
Visual resources
Use these as a starting constraint if you want one. They are not part of the required solution.
Open Sans & Source Sans Pro
Clear interface writing gives people the confidence to understand what changed and decide what to do next.
Open Sans & Source Sans Pro
Clear interface writing gives people the confidence to understand what changed and decide what to do next.
Theory to review
UX principles for this brief
Use these as decision lenses, then validate the design with the people and context in the brief.
