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MAGGIE SPANGENBERG 

Senior Business Analyst, The University of Texas at Austin

MAY 2025

VISUALIZING CLOUD SPEND AT UT

Charting the usage and adoption of fin-ops dashboards at UT Austin

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About UT Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a bold, ambitious leader supporting some 52,000 students, 3,000 teaching faculty, 15,000 staff and top national programs across 19 colleges and schools. As Texas’ leading research university, UT attracts more than $650 million annually for discovery.

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About the ETA Team

  • Situated within the Enterprise Technologies Team (UT’s central IT department)

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  • Comprised of AWS, Azure and GCP experts

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  • We partner with units across campus to help launch or optimize projects

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More about ETA

Cool projects we’re currently working on:​

  • Sage (Socratic and agentic AI tutor) ​
  • Cancer Genome Sequencing ($4 Million Grant)​
  • Generative AI for Researchers Program​

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  • In order to leverage enterprise discounts and support we centralized billing for all Cloud services when we formed ETA, 7 years ago.

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A look back at 2023

  • Spending ~ $100k per month
  • ~100 linked accounts
  • Dashboards were brand new to UT
  • Just about to open dashboards up to Campus

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Where we are now

  • Spending ~$200k per month
  • 330 Linked Accounts  
  • ~20 active dashboard users

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How adoption increased: 

  • We targeted purchasing officers of large departments with multiple AWS accounts
  • Used Athena to build departmental codes into our dashboard controls
  • Using row based permissions we granted access to dashboards based on departmental codes

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How purchasing officers use the dashboards:

  • D2I has been using our dashboards to track relevant AWS account spending each month across different services. This has been critical to help spot cost changes related to spinning up new services or closing down old ones, as well as helped us plan spending over time and better predict month-to-month costs. We review the dashboards regularly to detect anomalies and/or unexpected changes. The views have also been helpful as we estimate future growth patterns.

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How executive level decision makers use the dashboards:

  • Awareness of spend trends by department
  • Requested new columns including full department names for understanding information "at a glance"

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How I use the dashboards:

  • Answering questions around spend forecasting
  • Bill backs to departmental units
  • Automating communication about spend monthly

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Demo & Question Time