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Managing Anomalies

Definition

Anomaly Management is the ability to detect, identify, clarify, alert and manage unexpected or unforecasted cloud cost events in a timely manner, in order to minimize detrimental impact to the business, cost or otherwise.

Managing anomalies typically involves the use of tools or reports to identify unexpected spending, the distribution of anomaly alerts, and the investigation and resolution of anomalous usage and cost.

In the context of Cloud FinOps, anomalies are levels of spending that are different from the normal or expected spend.

Anomaly detection identifies data points, events, and/or observations that deviate from a dataset’s normal behavior. Detection tools & procedures allows the FinOps team to react quickly in order to maintain spend levels that an organization expects. To quickly find those needles in your cloud haystack, using automated, machine learning–based anomaly detection is key. These tools are generally offered by cloud providers and third party platforms.

Maturity Assessment

WHERE ARE ORGANIZATIONS IN TERMS OF MATURITY

Crawl

32.5%

Walk

50.5%

Run

17%

Organizations operating at a FinOps Run maturity was reflected by practitioner respones that indicated it takes hours for their teams to be aware of unexpected cost increases. Responses indicating that it takes up to a day or multiple days for teams to be aware of cost anomalies were cohorts operating at a FinOps Walk maturity. Responses indicating teams were unaware of unexpected cost increases for a week or more were reflected in organizations operating at a FinOps Crawl maturity


Crawl

Walk

Run


Functional Activity

As someone in a FinOps Practitioner role, I will…

As someone in an Engineering/Operations role, I will…

As someone in a Finance role, I will…

Measure(s) of Success & KPI

Measures of success are represented in the context of cloud costs and may include one or more key performance indicators ( KPI ), describe objectives with key results ( OKR ), and declare thresholds defining outliers or acceptable variance from forecasted trends.

Inputs

Get Involved

Get involved and contribute to the community by sharing your real world experiences related to this Capability in the form of a story or providing a playbook for how you have implemented best practices in your organization. Your real world experiences can be provided in the context of:

Join the conversation about this Capability in Slack . You can submit stories, how-tos and suggest improvements using one of the options for contributing here.

Related Domains

Featured Resources

Managing Cloud Cost Anomalies

Managing Cloud Cost Anomalies

How JFrog Handles Cloud Cost Anomaly Detection

How JFrog Handles Cloud Cost Anomaly Detection

Capability Assets