Use this article to understand what Analytics includes, how teams use it, and when to move from dashboards into deeper financial analysis.
What are Analytics?
Analytics in Yarken helps teams understand technology spend, performance, variance, and cost drivers across the business.
It brings together dashboards, reports, analytics cubes, Cost Explorer, and custom dashboards so users can move from a high-level view of spend to deeper analysis across cost pools, towers, vendors, applications, consumers, entities, and time.
Teams use it to understand what changed, where spend is concentrated, which areas are driving variance, and where further investigation is needed.
What you can do
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Review total IT spend across the current financial year.
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Track monthly spend against budget and forecast.
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Identify top budget variances by cost pool and tower.
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Analyze labor, vendor, application, cloud, solution offering, and consumer spend.
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Drill into reports and dashboards for greater detail.
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Use Analytics to explore spend across dimensions and cubes.
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Compare spend, budget, and forecast performance over time.
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Analyze cloud spend by provider, service, application, and share of total IT spend.
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Use entity and currency filters to focus analysis by organization structure and reporting preference.
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Create custom dashboard views for recurring analysis and reporting needs.
How teams use Analytics
Most teams begin on the Home page.
Home gives a fast read on overall technology spend, current month performance, projected full year spend, budget variance, and major spend categories. It helps users see where attention is needed before moving into deeper analysis.
From there, teams use dashboards and reports to investigate specific areas. A variance in a cost pool can lead to tower analysis. A tower issue can lead to vendor or cost center detail. A cloud trend can lead to provider, application, or consumption analysis.
Analytics is used when teams need more flexibility. Users can explore data across cubes, dimensions, filters, and time periods to answer specific financial and operational questions.
Custom dashboards are used when teams need repeatable views for leadership reviews, operating cadences, or focused analysis.
Common questions Analytics helps answer
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Where is technology spend concentrated this month?
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Which cost pools or towers are driving budget variance?
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Which vendors are contributing most to spend?
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How is cloud spend changing over time?
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Which applications or solution offerings are consuming the most cost?
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How are actuals performing against budget and forecast?
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Which consumers or business areas are driving demand?
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How does spend look by entity, currency, or reporting period?
Core areas covered
Home
Home gives users an executive-level view of spend, trends, variance, and key cost categories. It is the starting point for understanding the current state of technology spend.
Dashboards and Reports
Dashboards and reports provide structured views into specific areas such as finance overview, tower spend, vendor spend, labor, cloud, applications, solution offerings, and consumers.
Many dashboard charts support drilldown, allowing users to move from summary-level insight into more detailed reports.
Analytics
Analytics gives users a more flexible way to explore data across cubes and dimensions. It supports deeper investigation when standard dashboards are not enough.
Cost Explorer
Cost Explorer provides an interactive way to explore spend across the model. It helps teams investigate cost movement and understand how spend flows through the structure.
Custom Dashboards
Custom Dashboards allow teams to create focused views for recurring analysis, leadership reporting, or specific operating needs.
What makes it different
Analytics in Yarken is not just reporting.
It is connected to the same TBM and FinOps model used across planning, chargeback, and Ask Yarken. This means spend analysis is grounded in the same structures used for budget, forecast, allocation, and accountability.
Teams are not looking at isolated dashboards. They are analyzing spend through a connected financial model.
That makes variance analysis more useful, cloud and vendor insights easier to interpret, and financial conversations more consistent across IT, Finance, FinOps, and business stakeholders.
When to use Analytics
Use Home when you need a fast view of current spend and major movement.
Use dashboards and reports when you need structured analysis of a known area.
Use Analytics when you need to explore data more flexibly.
Use Cost Explorer when you want to investigate spend movement across the model.
Use Custom Dashboards when you need a repeatable view for reviews, reporting, or ongoing monitoring.
For detailed step by step instructions on using dashboards, reports, Analytics, Cost Explorer, and Custom Dashboards, refer to the relevant user guides.
Next step
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