Understanding and Managing Cloud Costs with FinOps

by Quinten Noels, Cloud Technical Architect, Hybrid Datacenter | DexMach

Introduction

Lately, more than ever, cost has become a hot topic when talking Cloud. With growing environments, services being added every other day, keeping an overview can become quite challenging. Scaling in the cloud is fun, until you get the receipt at the end of the month. Through the FinOps culture, we’re trying to bring more knowledge to organizations in order for them to have a better understanding on how to properly manage their workload but also how to spot anomalies faster. In this blog, we’ll show how you can improve your insights.

Cloud Insights

As stated above, FinOps is a culture. It’s not only about fancy graphics, buying reservations and turning on AHUB. FinOps is a continuous process, in which we try to maximize the value of business workload, in relation to the price tag. This can only be achieved if the people within the organization have the necessary understanding and the correct work tools. Combining these 2 will result in well-informed and thoughtful decision-making.

At DexMach we assist our partners by going through a standardized cost program with them. We try to pass on knowledge so that the customer can eventually execute Cost Management on his own. Starting with governance (for example: tagging, policies) we’ll cover all required topics to build a well-structured foundation. This results in straightforward decision making and will allow the customer to act independently.

Secondly, the customer requires the correct work tools. Azure already provides some reporting through the Cost Management blade (Cost analysis/Advisor recommendations). By consuming the Cost Management API and the Azure Resource Graph, these can be extended or customized to your wishes. We provide PowerBI dashboards to our customers which contain predefined intelligence and are easily accessible/understandable. A FinOps dashboard should contain information that can be transformed directly into action items. This enables a CFO to make key-decisions through one simple view.

To gain a little understanding of how you can leverage the combination of the Azure Cost Management API and the Resource Graph to gain informative insights, we’ll provide a sample workbook. The following view can be gained within a few minutes if you can handle a little bit of Kusto Query Language.

In Azure Cost Analysis you would be able to consult disk pricing but it doesn’t contain any information on which disks are unused. That information can however be gained by querying the Resource Graph. Within Azure workbooks, we can retrieve both datasets (Disks with their pricing & orphaned disks) by talking to the 2 APIs (Cost Management API & Resource Graph). After merging these together, we’ll get a nice and simple overview of how much these orphaned disks are costing us per hour/month. You could think of other use cases such as VMs being underutilized, storage accounts with old files and many more. Building this intelligence and combining the different views together would give you one place to look at which contains the exact information you need to notify an application owner that he’s overspending.

Code to the workbook can be found here: https://github.com/dexmach/costworkbooks

Conclusion

Rather than merely going for quick cost-savings, companies should look to embrace the FinOps culture. Building the knowledge for your organization will take time but will be beneficial in the long run. Support that knowledge by leveraging the right insights and you will not only be saving costs but also maximize value of your cloud investments.

DexMach stands ready to assist your organization on their journey towards cloud excellence, feel free to reach out!