CerteroX FinOps Capability Alignment

FOCUS data: Who is the audience?

This story describes an incident of confusion arising from inexperienced interrogation of FOCUS cost data.

The author (Peter Chance, Certero) is a FinOps Practitioner who has an extensive infrastructure background and has been working with cloud optimization since the beginnings of FinOps in 2019.

This story is primarily aimed at organization’s and Practitioners beginning their FinOps journey.

Understanding Cloud Usage

How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Core Personas?

Data Ingestion

CerteroX for Cloud can ingest data from AWS, Azure, and Google. Cloud data is collected and stored from a range of sources including costs, utilization metrics, resource inventory, and other supplementary vendor sources such as data for prices and SKUs. Ingested data is normalized where it makes sense, for example, virtual machines for GCP, AWS, and Azure are normalized with the resource type of instance and Azure managed disks, AWS EBS volumes, and GCP persistent disks are normalized to volume. The result is a complete data set linking everything together for contextual analysis, for example instance utilization optimization brings together cost data, utilization metrics, and resource inventory to show explicit value and with reporting features supporting deeper analysis.

Allocation

CerteroX for Cloud allows organizations to automatically group their costs into pools to reflect their own hierarchical structures, for example for business units, teams, projects, cost centers, etc. Costs are assigned to pools using prioritized allocation rules, the criteria for which may reference resource names and the properties and metadata embedded within identifiers, tags and labels, cloud provider, source, resource type, and region. Features that support accountability include spend limits for pools and the assignment of ownership and dashboarding, and visual cues for pools exceeding forecast or actual spend limits, and e-mail notifications to owners regarding spend limit breaches.

Reporting & Analytics

CerteroX for Cloud includes several features for reporting and analytics. For example, the Cost Explorer provides high-level trending of daily, weekly, and monthly aggregation of costs over customizable date ranges with datapoint drill-through capability and interrogation by a range of standard dimensions. Our cost map feature shows multi-cloud spend across normalized regions. Resource-centric cost reporting provides detailed historical reporting with filtering by a range of dimensions, conditions, and tags. The date range can be customized and aggregated per day, week, and month. The visuals can be categorized by key dimensions. We can save our report settings as perspectives to define reusable reports. The area below the resource cost chart shows explorable interactive detail. This report is perfect for visual and data-driven analysis of spend patterns and anomalies. Above the chart is cost-quantified link to optimization insights, which identify opportunities for improvement with full explanations, customizable criteria, and drill-through capability.

Anomaly Management

Users can build anomaly identification policies to detect unexpected changes in costs or resource counts, specifying the evaluation in days and the percentage change detection threshold, and scoping the policy by filtering on pool, resource type, tags, etc. Anomaly policy breaches will be called out on the policy section of the dashboard, and summary details are presented on the main anomaly screen with a mini chart encompassing the policy time frame and violations. Drilling into a policy shows violation history with immediate access within the context of the policy to explore root causes. Pivoting to resource-centric cost reporting, facilitates detailed forensic analysis. Anomaly breaches will trigger e-mail notifications to FinOps stakeholders.

Quantify Business Value

How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Core Personas?

Planning & Estimating

Planning and estimating involves a range of data inputs, including historical spend patterns and pricing for new workloads. Spend patterns and data are available through the range of cost reporting features. Resource pricing data is available using the Instance Prices feature, which is a multi-vendor virtual machine price exploration and comparison tool. With this, users can interrogate vendor pricing APIs in real time to retrieve virtual machine prices filtered on vendor, region, currency, and provision capacities. Desirable types can then be selected for comparison. Planning and estimating inevitably involves external reporting, and for this, our data export facility will send automated scheduled exports of resource and cost data to cloud storage for ingestion and interrogation in external reporting platforms.

Forecasting

In CerteroX for Cloud, costs are allocated into pools and each pool may have a monthly spend limit assigned. The statistical treatment of historical monthly spend will formulate a predicted “this month” forecast for cost pools. If a pool is forecast to exceed the pool limit by the end of the current month, the risks are called out using a range of reporting features including indicators on the pools screen, global spend forecast breaches, and a pool status tile on the dashboard; and, of course, e-mail notifications to pool owners.

Budgeting

In addition to the pool limits, CerteroX for Cloud has dedicated budgeting capabilities where users can build resource quotas, recurring spend budgets, and expiring spend budgets; with filtering to define the resources, costs, and scope of the budget. Budget status is visible on the main budget screen and on the policy violations section of the dashboard. And of course, there are e-mail notification options for each of the three budget types.

Benchmarking

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Unit Economics

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Optimize Cloud Cost Usage

How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Core Personas?

Workload Optimization

On the executive dashboard, we have a summary of optimization insights, where drilling in takes us to the insights page where summary information suggests total savings for all optimizations and provides links to some specialist optimization screens, including for rate optimization. There is a large and growing range of optimization insights, covering scenarios such as underutilization, misconfiguration, abandonment, and security. The insights tiles are fully described in the user interface, explaining the configuration and usage patterns that define the recommendation. The settings and thresholds for the recommendation logic can be customized by users. Analysis is possible using drill-through links to key metrics and usage patterns, and also through cost inspection. Resources and pools can be excluded and dismissed from specific recommendations, and if the resources are remediated, they will automatically fall out of scope of the recommendation.

Rate Optimization

Optimization insights will highlight short-lived instances which may be candidates for preemptible pricing and also reveals instances that have existed for longer periods, but for which costs have not been covered by committed use discounts. A summary information visual provides navigation to Reserved Instance and Savings Plan reporting, showing a global view of how the organization is performing in respect of committed use discounts. A chart shows a breakdown of instance billing by charge category and commitment discount type such as Savings plans, Reserved instances, and Pay as You Go. Another chart shows a cost-centric view of usage with an option to see projected savings on pay-as-you-go costs. Finally, the instance prices feature supports cost-aware region selection.

Architecting for Cloud

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Licensing & SaaS

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Cloud Sustainability

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Manage the FinOps Practice

How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Core Personas?

Cloud Policy & Governance

CerteroX for Cloud has a range of policies, controls, and governance mechanisms to ensure alignment of cloud use. Cost pools may have spend limits assigned, forecasting will warn of projected spend limit beaches, and pools may have owners assigned. Optimization insight recommendations act as guardrails for cloud configuration and management. Resource schedules can be defined to control start and stop times for virtual machines. Tag compliance rules support organizational tagging requirements. Resource quotas track resource deployment. Budgets allow spend benchmarking and identification of overspend. Anomaly identification policies call out unexpected cost and deployment behaviors. Finally, for all of those controls, e-mail notifications ensure owners and stakeholders are advised of breaches.

Invoicing & Chargeback

Cost pools with criteria-based allocation rules allow alignment of cost and usage data to organizations invoice reconciliation and chargeback requirements. Viewing cost data by a single month, or range of months, and grouping by pool, provides categorized spend totals aligned with monthly invoice cycles. Exploring resource-centric reporting provides data for deeper reconciliation and analysis. Unallocated costs can be analyzed to identify opportunities to refine cost allocation rules and criteria, ready for the next reporting period. The data export facility will feed data to external reporting platforms, e.g. Power BI, where complex cost categorization and analysis can be performed to support specific workflows and accounting practices.

FinOps Practice Operations

Not Applicable to CerteroX

FinOps Education & Enablement

Not Applicable to CerteroX

FinOps Assessment

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Onboarding Workloads

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Intersecting Disciplines

Not Applicable to CerteroX

Technology Concentration, Cloud Providers, FinOps Scopes & Compliance

Does your software have a specific technology concentration, preferred cloud provider compatibility, or achieved compliances?

FinOps Scopes

The CerteroX unified platform encompasses two scopes: public cloud and SaaS. The SaaS module includes functionality and reporting encompassing usage, discovery, subscription management, cost reporting, optimization, and more.

Cloud Providers

CerteroX for Cloud provides cloud cost management and optimization for three providers: AWS, Azure, and Google.

Compliances

Certero maintains two compliances: ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus. Both are formal, third-party audited compliances that demonstrate our organization’s adherence to specific security controls and practices.

Technology Concentration

Not Applicable to CerteroX

ISO 27001 Certified

Certero is committed to assuring your security, which is why Information Security Management is embedded as part of our culture. From the board down, our continually tested processes help customers have safer, more reliable IT hardware, Software, SaaS and Cloud solutions and Services.