Find out your Azure spend is going wrong on Tuesday. Not on the invoice.
SpendGuard watches your Azure consumption every day and puts a person on the phone to you while there is still time to do something about it.
Three questions. Yes or no.
If any answer is “no” or “not sure”, that gap is what SpendGuard closes.
1. If someone left a test environment running tonight, would you know before month-end?
Reports are autopsies.
Most cloud cost tools are very good at explaining what happened last month. That is useful for the post-mortem and useless for the patient. By the time a monthly report shows the spike, the money has gone.
SpendGuard is built for the other question: is there still time to act? If the answer is no, the service has failed, however good the reporting looked. That is the standard we hold it to.
“If you want prettier charts, there are better tools. SpendGuard is for people who want a phone call.”
Early warning. With a person attached.
SpendGuard is an early-warning service that Crimson Line runs every day across your Azure consumption. It looks for budget exposure, sharp changes in spend, and subscriptions that appear or disappear unexpectedly, and it gets those in front of someone who can act.
Visibility is how it works.
Daily tracking of your Azure consumption, budget position, forecast trajectory, and subscription inventory.
Unwatched subscriptions and unscaled resources accrue daily charges silently between monthly billing cycles.
Consumption data is refreshed every morning across your validated Azure estate so anomalies surface within 24 hours.
Time to act is what you are buying.
An engineer checks the cause and your Customer Success Manager calls you while you can still change the outcome.
Finding out about a runaway workload on your Day 30 invoice means the budget has already been spent.
Investigated by an Azure engineer first, then brought directly to you by your Customer Success Manager within one business day.
Five warnings. Each one worth a call.
We keep the volume deliberately low. An alert is only worth having if it is worth acting on, so repeats are suppressed unless something has materially changed.
| Warning | What it means | Who contacts you |
|---|---|---|
|
Budget threshold reached
|
Your consumption has crossed the budget agreed for the period. | Your Customer Success Manager. Every time. |
|
Predicted budget overrun
|
Your spend is on track to exceed the budget before the period ends. | Your Customer Success Manager, where the forecast points to a material overrun. |
|
Unusual consumption
|
Usage has changed sharply, or in a pattern that does not match your normal profile. | Our Azure team investigates first, then your Customer Success Manager if action is needed. |
|
New subscription detected
|
A subscription has appeared in your estate that we have not yet validated. | Our Azure team or your Customer Success Manager. |
|
Missing or dormant subscription
|
An expected subscription is absent, or one is showing no usage at all. | Our Azure team or your Customer Success Manager. |
Timing: Consumption data is refreshed daily, so a change in spend is normally visible the following morning. When a warning is raised, your Customer Success Manager will contact you within one business day.
A person, not a ping.
Azure can already email you when a budget is crossed. The email goes to whoever set it up, and it often lands in a folder nobody reads. A SpendGuard warning reaches your Customer Success Manager, who has already looked at what is driving it and who picks up the phone.
Standard Azure Alert
An automated threshold email sent to whichever address configured the rule — with no context on what caused the spike and no follow-up if the email is missed.
Lands in an inbox rule or distribution group with zero root-cause investigation attached.
SpendGuard Early Warning
Investigated by an Azure engineer first, then brought directly to you by your named Customer Success Manager with what changed and what you can do about it.
You get a phone call with the subscription, the workload driving the change, and the options to contain it.
What happens before we call.
Every warning is backed by daily subscription reconciliation, budget tracking, and engineering verification before your Customer Success Manager picks up the phone.
Every day, we reconcile your subscriptions against our records, so nothing new goes unwatched and nothing missing goes unnoticed.
We track your consumption against the budget we set and maintain with you.
We project your spend to the end of the period and compare it with that budget.
When something looks wrong, an engineer checks the cause before anyone picks up the phone.
Your Customer Success Manager calls you with what changed, what is driving it, and what you can do about it.
Predicted spend & your own dashboard.
Predicted spend
SpendGuard projects your consumption to the end of the period, so the conversation changes from “you have overspent” to “you are on track to overspend”.
A forecast is an early warning, not a promise: it cannot see a deployment you have planned but not made, a one-off purchase, a reservation or a commercial change agreed elsewhere.
Tell us what is coming and we’ll build it into your budget ahead of the deployment.
Your own dashboard
See your position yourself, without waiting for us. Your dashboard arrives as a link: no software to install, no portal account to maintain.
It shows your subscriptions only. You will never see another customer’s data, and no other customer can see yours.
Issued, scoped, and maintained by Crimson Line so your leadership and finance teams can check budget position anytime.
| In your view | Not in your view |
|---|---|
| Current and historical Azure consumption for your subscriptions | Any other customer’s data |
| Your budget threshold and how close you are to it | Crimson Line commercial, margin and pricing information |
| Predicted spend and predicted budget position for this period | Internal investigation notes and case history |
| Subscription-level breakdown, including new and dormant subscriptions | The full feature set of Azure Cost Management |
We run the warning. You own the decision.
| We are responsible for | You are responsible for |
|---|---|
| Setting and maintaining your budget thresholds | Telling us when a planned change will move your spend |
| Monitoring consumption, anomalies and subscription changes daily | Keeping a named contact available, and telling us when that person changes |
| Raising warnings and making contact | Responding while there is still time to act |
| Issuing, scoping and revoking your dashboard link | Sharing the link only inside your organisation |
| Investigating unusual consumption and explaining what drove it | Acting on the finding, including any change to your resources |
Worried about your spend right now? You don’t need to wait for a warning. Log a ticket via the Crimson Line Client Portal → or call your Customer Success Manager on 086 111 4496.
Boundaries, published.
Being clear about limits protects both of us. SpendGuard does not cap your Azure spend, block a deployment or suspend a service.
It does not guarantee cost containment or the accuracy of a forecast. It does not replace Azure Cost Management, your own budgeting, or your finance controls, and it is not a billing system: your invoice remains the record of what you owe.
A warning still needs a decision from someone in your organisation.
What it costs, before you ask.
SpendGuard is included in every Cloud Accountability tier, from START upwards.
SpendGuard also needs a small storage account in your own Azure environment to hold the consumption files it analyses. That shows on your Azure bill like any other resource.
We would rather you hear it from us than find it on your invoice.
Pick how much of Azure you want us to own.
| Provisioning only | START — Where most clients begin | CORE — Recommended | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | We provision; you carry full responsibility for consumption | SpendGuard early warning, budget thresholds and alerting, subscription hygiene, monthly cost and usage reporting | Everything in START, plus business-hours Azure operations, issue resolution and governance |
| Who hears about an overspend first | The invoice | You, from your Customer Success Manager | You, from your Customer Success Manager |
Don’t take our word for it. Open one.
Explore a working SpendGuard dashboard built on sample data. Look at the budget line, the forecast and the subscription view, and decide whether you’d want this for your own estate.
Want to know what SpendGuard would have told you last quarter? Book a no-obligation Azure spend review and we’ll walk through where a warning would have fired.