Commitment coverage

Steady, predictable usage that runs on on-demand pricing is leaving a discount on the table. Reservations, Savings Plans, and committed-use discounts trade a term commitment for a lower rate. The risk is the mirror image: a commitment you over-buy, under-use, or scope too narrowly wastes money instead of saving it.

What we look for

• Coverage gaps — a steady baseline of on-demand spend on a family/region that a commitment would cover, sized from your real usage history with a modelled payback and waste-risk.
• Under-utilized commitments — reservations or plans you already hold that aren’t being fully consumed, where a scope change or exchange recovers value.
• Expiring soon / scope mismatch — coverage about to lapse, or scoped so narrowly it can’t apply where the usage actually is.

Every recommendation carries the coverage percent, the monthly commit, the break-even month, and the modelled waste risk — so finance can sign off on the term, not just the headline saving.

Workloads you already know are leaving

Sizing reads your billing history. History cannot see a decision you have already made: a server you are decommissioning next spring, a project winding down, a migration that ends in eighteen months. That spend is in every month we look at, so it lands in the baseline at full weight — and a three-year purchase gets sized on money you will stop spending.

If you already know a workload is leaving, mark it and we size the term around it. Open a recommendation, find the resource in the spend-ranked list inside it, and give it an expected end month with a reason. From then on:

• A three-year purchase stops counting spend that ends in eighteen months.
• A one-year purchase still counts it, because it survives that term. The same resource can make a shorter commitment the better buy — and often does.
• Every term shows its own baseline, so you can see exactly what was set aside and how much the commitment actually moved.

Marking is reversible, records who made the call and why, and is blocked on a recommendation you have already accepted — the purchase paperwork is written by then, and it should not disagree with the engine.

Note

Your coverage percentage does not move. Coverage is what your bill says, not what you intend, so nothing you mark changes it. Marking changes what we recommend you buy, and nothing else.

”We can’t read your commitments”

Your bill and your commitment inventory come from two different Azure APIs. Cost data always shows that a reservation discount was applied; listing the reservation itself — its term, rate, and utilization — needs the optional Reservations Reader role at tenant scope, which lives outside subscription RBAC.

When we see commitment discounts on your bill that we could not read, the Commitments page says so directly, names the benefits and their monthly cost, and tells you the role to grant. Without it your commitments are billed but invisible: no utilization, no expiry warnings, no under-use findings. Grant it (see Connect a cloud account) and they appear on the next refresh.

How to act

Commitments are largely one-way — they are not freely cancellable — so the pre-check is “will this baseline hold for the full term?”, validated with finance. leancosts produces the purchase parameters and the audit trail; it never executes the purchase. Follow Act on a cost finding.