Tooling

This chapter covers the tools teams use to see, analyse and watch their cloud cost: the cost consoles AWS, Microsoft and Google provide with the customer account, and everything teams run beside or beyond them. Most searches for FinOps tools are really searches for an answer to one of a few questions, so the chapter sorts tools by those questions rather than by vendor.

What this chapter covers

The first section, Native, describes the providers' own consoles: AWS Cost Explorer with AWS Budgets and the billing console, Microsoft Cost Management within Azure Cost Management and Billing, and the Google Cloud billing reports and budgets. For each it answers which costs the console shows, from whose point of view, how far back and with which cost measure. Each console is built around its own provider's cloud, and what it shows depends on the account or scope you look through. Knowing that is what lets you read its numbers correctly and notice when a question has outgrown it.

The second section, Beyond, describes what teams use alongside or instead of the consoles. It sorts cost tooling into categories and says which job each category does. It explains what open-source projects bring to Kubernetes cost, cost estimates in code and policy, how spreadsheets and BI work on exported billing data, how APIs and Terraform bring cost into the delivery process, and what an AI assistant needs to read cost data through an interface. No vendor of commercial cost software is named, compared or recommended: the categories describe jobs, and different tools do the same job differently well.

Every choice starts from the same four questions:

• Which clouds? A single cloud can often be answered in its own console. Once two providers, Kubernetes clusters or SaaS invoices meet, you need one data basis in which the costs are comparable.
• Which data source? Console, API or export. The console shows aggregated views, the API returns slices on request, the export carries every line item. Whether the data arrives in the provider's own format or in FOCUS, and whether costs without an interface come in by file import, decides how much preparation sits in front of every analysis.
• Who reads it? Engineering wants a dashboard that shows which service got more expensive since yesterday. Finance needs a cost report that ties to the invoice, in the reporting currency and with one fixed cost definition. Leadership needs a few numbers with owners. A tool that serves only one of these groups leaves the others with spreadsheets.
• What does it cost to run? Billed API requests, storage for exports, queries in the data warehouse, upkeep of pipelines and permissions, and the hours someone spends on it every month. A tool nobody maintains produces, after a few months, numbers nobody trusts.

For single jobs that need no set-up, such as converting a cloud bill or comparing instance types, the site's free tools are available.

Key terms

• Cost report: the fixed, repeatable view against which a tool shows whether it ties to the invoice.
• Dashboard: the interactive view the providers' consoles bring and other tools extend.
• Budget: the threshold every native console watches, with differences in scope and refresh.
• Anomaly: the unexpected cost change that consoles and tools detect with their own models.
• FOCUS: the open billing data specification in which exports from different clouds carry the same columns.
• File import: the route for costs that have no interface and arrive as a file.

Neighbouring chapters

This is the last chapter of the handbook; the glossary follows it on the hub. It builds on the chapters before it, because every tool reads the same data and shows the same reports: Billing data and standards describes the exports and columns every tool takes its numbers from, and Reporting and analysis describes the reports, comparisons and anomalies a tool is expected to show. What a budget or forecasting tool has to do is set out in Budgets, forecasts and finance, and which allocation it has to represent in Allocation and ownership. The chapter just before this one, Europe: currency, tax and sovereignty, adds the questions about reporting currency, VAT and data location that European teams bring to the choice of a tool.