THE CHALLENGE
Alinta Energy faced escalating and unclear Databricks costs, driven by dual charging, complex pricing, and limited visibility across projects.
HOW WE HELPED
Furō implemented a cost observability solution for Databricks, combining interactive dashboards, real-time attribution, and optimisation strategies to give Alinta full transparency and control of their spend.
OUR IMPACT
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32% reduction in annual Databricks and Azure spend
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4x query performance improvement
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98% cost attribution accuracy, enabling proactive, data-driven optimisation
INDUSTRY
Energy and Utilities
LOCATION
Australia
SERVICES
FinOps, Observability, Cost Optimisation
TECHNOLOGIES
Databricks, Azure, Unity Catalog, PowerBI
“Furō’s cost observability capability has fundamentally changed the way we run our Databricks estate. For years, we’ve been looking for a way to get accurate real-time transparency at the job, environment, and project level, and frankly, nothing on the market came close.
Since implementing this solution, we have cut platform costs by 32%. That’s not a minor optimisation - that’s material impact straight to the bottom line. More importantly, we now have the visibility and levers to keep driving efficiency in a sustained way.
This isn’t just about cost savings - it’s given us confidence in how we budget, forecast and make cloud strategy decisions. What Furō have built is, in my view, the benchmark for cost management and observability in modern data platforms.”
-- Brad Walker, General Manager - Data & AI, Alinta Energy
The Customer
Alinta Energy is one of Australia’s largest energy retailers, generators, investors, and developers. In the last decade they’ve grown from being the largest residential gas retailer in Western Australia to the preferred electricity and gas provider for more than 1.1 million homes and businesses Australia-wide and are harnessing data to make energy more affordable and reliable.
The Challenge
Alinta Energy's Enterprise Data Platform strategically leverages Databricks as the technical backbone of its data strategy, enabling advanced analytics, AI-driven decision-making, and operational efficiency across its energy generation, trading and retail operations.
However, as we have seen with many organisations, as workloads expanded, Alinta Energy struggled to understand and govern their consumption and cost, leading to uncontrolled spending, inefficiencies, and challenges in attributing costs to business units or projects.
They recognised an urgent need for robust cost observability and governance capabilities, not natively available from Databricks.
Key challenges Alinta Energy faced with Databricks cost governance:
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Dual Charges: they incurred two primary charges - consumption costs for Databricks and Azure infrastructure costs. This duality complicates the understanding of total expenses.
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Complex Pricing Model: Databricks’ pricing is based on Databricks Units (DBUs), which vary depending on workload types, instance configurations, and cloud providers. This complexity made it difficult to estimate and control costs effectively.
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Granular Cost Tracking Issues: they were unable to differentiate costs by specific initiatives or allocate budget accurately across teams/projects resulting in inaccurate forecasts.
Furō's Approach
Alinta Energy engaged Furō to implement cost observability capability to provide better visibility into spending patterns, enable more accurate budgeting and forecasting, and unlock cost savings opportunities by eliminating inefficiencies like over-provisioned clusters or idle resources.
Furō's cost observability solution for Databricks elevated Alinta Energy's financial operations from reactive oversight to strategic value optimisation, enabling data-driven cost optimisation initiatives.
Key solution features and benefits:
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Powerful Interactive Context-Driven Dashboards - we delivered custom analytics to map Azure & Databricks spend to business units, projects, and workloads, enabling Alinta Energy to visualise their Azure & Databricks spend with clarity.
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Real-Time Granular Cost Attribution - enabling precision visibility and control with granular tracking of Databricks Workspaces, Clusters and Job-level spend with automated anomaly alerts.
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Forecasting Precision - we achieved 98% cost attribution accuracy, empowering data-driven forecasting and budget planning for future projects and extensions.
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Cost Optimisation - using insights generated from the dashboards enabled us to identify and implement cost optimisation initiatives including resource lifecycle optimisation, right-sizing, automated predictive shutdowns, cluster configuration optimisation, plus more.
Outcomes Delivered
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32% cost reduction in annual Azure and Databricks costs
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4x increase in query performance - via serverless transition and compute optimisations
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98% cost attribution - achieved through automated tagging and monitoring.
Alinta Energy now has unprecedented control over their Databricks spend. For the first time, Alinta Energy now have instant access to Databricks consumption data, enabling proactive decision-making and more efficient spend management.
They can now analyse costs by project, environment, and job name, making changes based on usage patterns and tracking the impact before receiving monthly billing reports. This has unlocked a new level of cost optimisation and cultural transformation across their teams, empowering teams to move from "monitoring" to managing and from "reacting" to optimising.
“I look at the dashboards every single day - they’ve become part of how I run the platform. Before, we were managing Databricks costs at the top line, but we couldn’t see what was really driving spend. Furō gave us the roadmap and tooling to break it down at the job, project, and environment level.
That daily visibility means I can spot issues early, make adjustments quickly, and stop waste before it gets out of hand. It’s not just about savings - it’s about control and confidence. I know exactly where our money is going, and that allows me to make better calls on how we use our resources."
-- David FIndlay, DevOps Manager, Alinta Energy
"Setting the bar high for data visualisation. Great work."
-- Gavin Chew, Data Governance Manager, Alinta Energy