Understand Cloud Usage & Cost
Framework / Domains / Understand Cloud Usage & Cost
The outcome of this Domain is better understanding of an organization’s use of the cloud.
Within this Domain, organizations work to gather all required information about their cloud costs, usage, and other metrics; normalize it across data sources; define how it will be allocated among cloud users; and define reporting to make data available for use by all personas in this and in other Domains.
Organizations will gather cloud usage data from cloud providers and other service providers; define and gather related metrics such as cost, utilization, carbon use; and document the organizational metadata used to categorize, allocate and summarize cloud cost and usage.
This Domain focuses on understanding and allocating the cost and usage within the organization. Information and insights generated in this Domain will be used by every other Domain and other parts of the organization for a wide variety of purposes.
The Capabilities in this Domain will help the organization:
- Identify, catalog, and ingest all relevant cloud cost and usage data
- Normalize data as necessary across sources, using FOCUS datasets as a priority
- Define an Allocation strategy to map all costs back to internal cloud users
- Define techniques and policies to allocate shared cost and resources
- Create and define consistent reporting tools, parameters, and methods
- Define and distribute contextually relevant reporting data to personas where they operate
- Understand and document the needs of allied personas working in intersecting disciplinesthroughout the organization to understand their cloud cost and usage data needs. This includes intersecting disciplines such as ITAM, ITIL, Sustainability, and Security
This Domain directly supports these FinOps Principles:
- Everyone is responsible for their cloud use
- FinOps data should be accessible and timely
- A centralized team drives FinOps
- Teams need to collaborate
This Domain enables an organization to understand what cloud services it’s using, what is driving spend, and who is responsible for that spend. Activities in this Domain provides data consistently to support a picture of current cloud usage and also a view into historical trends, at a level of granularity to support all the other Domains appropriate to the organization’s current maturity level.
This Domain answers the questions:
- What are we using in the cloud?
- What are we spending on it?
- What is the impact of that usage in carbon or other metrics important to us?
- Who in the organization is responsible for that usage and cost?
- How can all personas access that cost and usage data?
Data Ingestion 
Allocation 
Reporting & Analytics 
Anomaly Management