CUSTOMER STORY

Alinta Energy reduced Databricks spend by 32%.

As Alinta's data platform scaled across generation, trading, and retail, two billing systems produced figures that couldn't be reconciled. Here's how lumin8 changed that.

THE CUSTOMER

Alinta Energy: data at the centre of an energy business.

Alinta Energy is one of Australia's largest energy retailers, generators, and developers — providing electricity and gas to more than 1.1 million homes and businesses across the country.

Databricks is the technical backbone of Alinta's Enterprise Data Platform, supporting analytics, AI-driven decision-making, and operational efficiency across energy generation, trading, and retail. As platform usage grew across teams and workloads, cost attribution at the workspace, cluster, and job level became a business requirement the existing tooling couldn't meet.

THE CHALLENGE

Databricks DBU and Azure infrastructure costs.

Two billing systems. No correlated view.

Alinta Energy's data platform runs on Databricks at scale. As workloads expanded across energy generation, trading, and retail, the complexity of cost governance grew with them.

Databricks consumption is billed in DBUs — a unit that varies by workload type, cluster configuration, and cloud provider. Azure infrastructure costs are billed separately. Without a solution that correlates both, the team couldn't identify which workloads were driving cost changes, couldn't allocate spend accurately to teams or projects, and had no way to confirm whether optimisation work was reducing true TCO or shifting cost between billing layers.

Alinta required job-level cost attribution across both billing systems, with the ability to confirm that cost optimisation initiatives were reducing true TCO — not shifting spend between layers.

" 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. "

— Brad Walker, General Manager – Data & AI, Alinta Energy

THE SOLUTION

Databricks-native cost observability.

Deployed inside your environment.

Furō deployed lumin8 for Alinta Energy, correlating Databricks DBU usage with underlying cloud infrastructure costs at the job and query level — giving engineering, FinOps, and finance teams a single trusted view of what Databricks is actually costing. It runs entirely inside the customer's Databricks environment. No data leaves. No external agents. No new infrastructure.

THE RESULTS

From insight to action

to measurable result.

lumin8 correlates Databricks DBU usage with underlying cloud infrastructure costs at the job and query level — giving engineering, finops, and finance teams a single trusted view of what Databricks is actually costing. It runs entirely inside the customer's Databricks environment. No data leaves. No external agents. No new infrastructure.

The team at Alinta Energy

Brad Walker
General Manager - Data and AI

“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.

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.”

See lumin8 in action

Book a personalised demo and discover how lumin8 can transform your Databricks cost management.

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