Reporting and analytics
Analyze cloud data to generate reports that help all members of an organization understand cloud resource usage and spending patterns. This process helps identify opportunities for improvement and enables the organization to make better-informed decisions about its cloud resources.
Ingest cloud financial data and contextual information
Define the scope for analytics and reporting, and communicate it to the data ingestion team.
Define the requirements for analytics and reporting, and provide them to FinOps tools and services.
Define common terms and standard classification methods for reports.
Identify internal and external data sources and their ingestion methods.
Generate cloud reports
Generate ad-hoc reports.
Generate research reports.
Generate cost presentation reports.
Generate regular, formal, and structured reports for automation or communication.
Support analytics and reporting needs for all roles
Provide appropriate training for all roles.
Define the classification and levels for sensitive data, and specify data access permissions for each role in the organization.
Manage report documentation, support reporting tasks, and iteratively develop the reporting system.
Distribute analytical data and reports to the relevant departments and roles.
Definition
Reporting and analytics is the practice of establishing reporting mechanisms to provide an organization with deep insights into its cloud financial data and meet the needs of various roles. This capability produces ad-hoc, cost presentation, research, and regular reports by detailing, highlighting, summarizing, classifying, and comparing cloud financial data. Reporting and analytics is a critical FinOps capability that supports nearly all other functions.
The term "report" in this context includes paper reports, electronic reports, dashboards, custom data feeds, and structured information APIs. These reports are created within the organization based on collected cloud data, metadata, operational data, and other data.
Data analytics and reporting uses data and metadata from cloud resources and systems to create reporting mechanisms for various roles. This capability primarily focuses on cloud cost and usage data. It can also be used to report on cloud sustainability, observability, and other related data. The relevant metadata policies are typically defined through cost allocation. The results of reporting and analytics are provided to the billing and chargeback, forecasting management, budget management, and cloud sustainability capabilities, and to all capabilities in the optimize cloud costs realm.
An organization typically uses tools from its cloud service provider or features from third-party tools for this capability. The organization should continuously maintain its reporting capabilities and deliver information to engineering, finance, procurement, sustainability, and other teams to support their duties.
The organization should also establish and continuously maintain guidelines for reporting. These guidelines include defining classifications and levels for sensitive data, precisely defining common reporting terms, and ensuring each role can access the relevant report data.
Maturity assessment
Crawl
Preset report templates are used with only basic capabilities for filtering and adjusting result views.
Reports focus on high-level cost and usage groups with limited granularity.
Incoming billing data is modified only through the native features of the cloud service.
Analysis results are communicated to teams manually.
Teams primarily rely on the core FinOps team to resolve questions about billing data.
Walk
Reporting tools support custom views and aggregations.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are tracked, and cost analysis reports are generated with fine granularity.
Additional data and business logic, such as synthetic tags, corrected values, and other business datasets, are centrally added to incoming usage and billing data.
Prediction and anomaly detection processes are implemented on the data.
Centralized dashboard reports are provided to teams.
Teams attempt to use reporting and analytics tools for self-service to answer questions about usage and billing data.
Run
Various datasets are merged into a single source of truth, for example, using tools such as FOCUS.
Complex business logic and additional data are handled.
Advanced prediction techniques, such as machine learning models, are used to integrate metrics and relationships beyond usage and cost, such as sustainability metrics.
Analysis results are automatically pushed to the dashboards and work queues used by engineering teams.
Most or all teams can perform reporting and analysis independently.
Functional activities
FinOps practitioner
Work with teams to determine which metrics, measurements, and metadata to include in "official" outputs.
Support teams in self-service access to reporting data.
Develop capabilities for data augmentation and for applying business logic to usage and billing data.
Provide expertise on usage and billing data to the entire organization.
Engineering
Proactively consider costs when evaluating solutions and selecting cloud services.
Obtain information from the FinOps team to strengthen FinOps awareness.
Learn and use the reports and dashboards provided by the FinOps team.
Work with the FinOps team to input data into existing dashboards and work queues to reduce the workload for engineers.
Set achievable cost targets for the team that meet KPIs meaningful to business partners.
Manage the development cycle to balance business capability output and optimization.
Finance
Guide the FinOps team on relevant reporting and data analytics use cases. This includes how data is presented, represented, sorted, summarized, and delivered.
Use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team.
Collaborate with the FinOps team to determine how to present cost information to all other roles.
Procurement
Guide the FinOps team on relevant reporting and data analytics use cases. This includes how data is presented, represented, sorted, summarized, and delivered.
Use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team.
Collaborate with the FinOps team to determine how to present usage, cost, and other sensitive or shareable data.
Product
Guide the FinOps team on relevant reporting and data analytics use cases. This includes how data is presented, represented, sorted, summarized, and delivered.
Use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team.
Management
Guide the FinOps team on relevant reporting and data analytics use cases. This includes how data is presented, represented, sorted, summarized, and delivered.
Use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team.
Confirm with teams the types of reports and data analysis results this capability should produce.
Prioritize cost and carbon emission targets for the organization based on overall business value.
Establish business objectives to guide teams in making trade-off decisions when faced with multiple conflicting high-priority items.
Associated roles
Guide the FinOps team on relevant reporting and data analytics use cases. This includes how data is presented, represented, sorted, summarized, and delivered.
Use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team.
Sustainability role: Proactively guide the FinOps team to use and sync reporting and analytics to advance corporate sustainability goals.
Success metrics and KPIs
Overall tag compliance rate is greater than 90%.
All core personnel can access cloud cost reporting data that includes additional information.
Products and services are designed to support the release of information related to their unit economics.
The FinOps team can define the required commitment coverage and utilization rates.
All core personnel can perform self-service reporting and conduct ad-hoc analysis of anomalies, utilization rates, cost outliers, and budget and forecast variances as needed.
The time required to investigate and analyze issues in cloud usage and cost reports is minimized.
Increased awareness, accountability, and sustainability consciousness regarding cloud spending among all core personnel.
Inputs and outputs
Inputs
Detailed cloud billing, cloud usage, and carbon emission data
APIs for collecting service utilization data and rate optimization data
Business intelligence and data visualization tools
Cost allocation metadata aligned with the company's cost center or departmental structure
Cost allocation models for shared services
Tagging standards and policies
Data from various work areas provided by relevant roles to supplement FinOps reporting and analytics
Outputs
Prediction results with variance thresholds
Coverage reports for allocated and unallocated resources
Rate optimization threshold reports that include commitment coverage and unutilized rates
Resource utilization reports, including benchmarking results for system properties such as CPU, memory, and storage
Role-based thematic analysis, such as for finance, engineering, product, sustainability, and management
Data exports that can be used by relevant roles in their functional activities
A centralized library of FinOps data and reporting tools that serves as the single source of truth