Reporting & Analytics

Framework / Domains / Understand Cloud Usage & Cost / Reporting & Analytics

Analyze cloud data and create reporting to gain insights into usage patterns and spend patterns, identify opportunities for improvement, and support informed decision-making about cloud resources.

Access cloud data and contextual information

Define reporting and analytics scope, provide to Data Ingestion
Define reporting and analytics requirements, provide to FinOps Tools & Services
Define common terminology, taxonomy to be used in reporting
Identify internal and external data sources and access methods

Report on cloud

Conduct ad hoc reporting
Support investigative reporting
Produce Showback reporting
Create routine, formal, structured reporting for automation or communication

Support reporting and analytics needs across personas

Train all personas on appropriate training
Identify data sensitivity, inclusion guidelines by persona
Manage reporting documentation, support, and development

Distribute reports and analytic data to appropriate organizations, personas

Definition

Reporting & Analytics is the ability to gain insights into cloud data by creating reporting mechanisms to serve the needs of the organization’s various persona groups. Reporting can detail, highlight, summarize, categorize, and compare cloud data to support ad hoc reporting, showback, investigative reports or routine reporting used by the organization. This is one of the most important and critical of the FinOps capabilities, supporting almost every other Capability.

Note: The term reporting in this sense is inclusive of paper or electronic reports, and also dashboards, customized data feeds, or APIs of structured information created by an organization from its cloud data, metadata, operational, or other data gathered in the Data Ingestion capability.

Data analysis and reporting leverages data and metadata on cloud resources and resource hierarchies, to create a variety of reporting mechanisms for each persona, according to their needs. This work will typically focus on the cloud cost and usage data, but may also include reporting on cloud sustainability data, observability, or other related data. Much of the strategy for these metadata will be defined in the Allocation capability. The results from Reporting & Analytics will be provided specifically for Invoicing & Chargeback, Forecasting, Budgeting, Cloud Sustainability and all of the Capabilities in the Optimize Cloud Usage & Cost domain.

In many cases, organizations will rely upon the native cloud-provider tools to satisfy parts of this capability. In other cases, third party tools will provide functionality. Organizations should consistently work to maintain its reporting capabilities, in order to put information in the path of engineering, finance, procurement, sustainability, and other teams supporting their duties.

Organizations will also need to establish and maintain over time the guidelines for reporting, including data sensitivity, common terminology (defined precisely) used in reporting, and ensuring that every persona has access to appropriate reporting data.

Maturity Assessment

Crawl

Use of canned reports with only basic ability to filter and alter result view
Reporting centered on high level cost and usage groupings with limited granularity
Modifications to incoming billing data only supported via native cloud service offerings
Analytic results are being manually communicated to teams
Teams lean largely on the central FinOps team to find the answers to questions they have on the billing data

Walk

Reporting tools enable custom views and aggregations
Granular reporting enabling KPI tracking and showback reporting
Data enrichment and business logic added to incoming usage and billing datasets (e.g. synthetic tags, correcting values, combining other business datasets such as sustainability)
Forecasts and anomaly detection processes implemented upon the data
Dashboard reporting is provided centrally to teams
Teams are starting to self-service to reports and analytics tools to find answers to questions they have on the usage and billing data

Run

Combining datasets into one source location (E.g. Using FOCUS)
Complex business logic and data enrichment is possible
Advanced forecast techniques including using ML models to incorporate indicators and relationship beyond usage and cost (eg. sustainability metrics)
Analytics results are pushed into dashboards and work queues used by Engineering teams (Data in the path)
Most—if not all—teams are finding value in self-service reporting and analytics

Functional Activities

FinOps Practitioner

As someone in the FinOps team role, I will…

Work with every group to determine the right metrics, measures and metadata that should be included in “official” output
Provide support to teams as they access reports in a self-service capacity
Develop the capability to enrich data and apply business logic to usage and billing data
Provide the organization with usage and billing data expertise

Engineering

As someone in an Engineering role, I will…

Actively include cost as a consideration when evaluating solution options and cloud services
Communicate with FinOps teams on the information that will best enable engineering with FinOps in mind
Learn and access reporting/dashboards provided by FinOps teams
Enable FinOps teams to put data into existing dashboards and work queues to lower the effort needed by engineers
Set achievable cost objectives for my teams, meet KPIs that are meaningful to my business partners
Manage development cycles in the context of both producing business capabilities and implementing optimizations

Finance

As someone in a Finance role, I will…

Work to provide guidance on my reporting and data analytics use cases to the FinOps team, how that data should be presented and represented, sorted, summarized and delivered
Work to use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team in the performance of my job
Collaborate with the Finops team to determine the appropriate way to represent cost information to all other personas

Procurement

As someone in a Procurement role, I will…

Work to provide guidance on my reporting and data analytics use cases to the FinOps team, how that data should be presented and represented, sorted, summarized and delivered
Work to use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team in the performance of my job
Collaborate with the FinOps team to determine appropriate ways to represent usage, cost and other data related to data sensitivity and sharing

Product

As someone in a Product role, I will…

Work to provide guidance on my reporting and data analytics use cases to the FinOps team, how that data should be presented and represented, sorted, summarized and delivered
Work to use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team in the performance of my job

Leadership

As someone in a Leadership role, I will…

Work to provide guidance on my reporting and data analytics use cases to the FinOps team, how that data should be presented and represented, sorted, summarized and delivered
Work to use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team in the performance of my job
Work with other personas to specify the type of reporting and data analytics which should be used and relied upon from this Capability
Set priorities for cost and carbon objectives for my organization in the context of overall business value
Establish business objectives that enable the team in making tradeoff decisions that have multiple competing priorities

Allied Personas

As someone in an Allied Persona role, I will…

Work to provide guidance on my reporting and data analytics use cases to the FinOps team, how that data should be presented and represented, sorted, summarized and delivered
Work to use the data analytics and reporting capabilities provided by the FinOps team in the performance of my job
As a sustainability persona, I will actively provide guidance to the FinOps team to leverage and synchronize reporting and analytics to champion corporate sustainability targets

Measures of Success & KPIs

Overall Tagging Compliance is greater than 90%
Context relevant cloud cost reporting data available to al Core Personas
Architecting products and services to support publishing information related to their unit economics
FinOps team can define desired level of commitment coverage vs. utilization
Self-service reporting and ability for ad hoc analysis about anomalies, utilization, cost outliers, budgets and forecast variances available to all Core Personas
Reduced investigative time for analysis of cloud usage and cost reporting questions
Increase in awareness, accountability and sustainability impact for cloud spend across all Core Personas

Inputs & Outputs

Inputs

Detailed cloud billing, usage and carbon data
Service specific API for gathering utilization data and rate optimization data
Business intelligence and data visualization tools
Cost allocation metadata aligned with company cost center/department hierarchy
Cost allocation model for shared services
Defined tagging standards and strategy
Data from Allied Personas from their discipline to supplement FinOps reporting and analysis

Outputs

Forecasts with variance thresholds
Allocated and unallocated resources coverage reports
Rate optimization threshold reports for commitment coverage and vacancy rates
Resource utilization reports include system attribute benchmarks (such as CPU, Memory, Storage)
Context specific analysis curated by Persona role/responsibility (Finance, Engineer, Product, Sustainability, Leadership, …etc)
Data exports that can be utilized by Allied Personas within their discipline activities
A centralized FinOps repository of data and reporting tool as the source of truth

View former Data Analysis and Showback page

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