Introduction
A key aspect of FinOps is cost management, which involves tracking, identifying, and optimizing cloud spend and usage. With Finout's centralized dashboard, known as the MegaBill, you can easily visualize your entire cloud spend and usage data in one place, pinpointing areas for cost and usage reduction, and enabling informed decisions on budget allocation and future planning.
This approach aligns with the FinOps principle of financial governance, promoting collaboration between IT and finance teams to enhance visibility, accountability, and control of cloud costs. Furthermore, by gaining a clear understanding of your cloud usage and spending patterns over time, you can identify trends and continuously optimize your cloud usage, reducing costs and aligning with your business objectives. This reflects the principle of continuous optimization, an ongoing process of identifying, implementing, and measuring cost-saving opportunities and improvements.
Tracking Cost and Usage in Finout’s MegaBill
The MegaBill includes the option to toggle between both cost monitoring and usage tracking data views. This dual tracking capability empowers you to not only manage expenses but also understand how resources are being utilized.
For example, consider tracking the running hours of an EC2 family. As part of a savings plan with your cloud provider for that specific EC2 family, you receive a discount, but your usage remains constant. The value of seeing usage data lies in your ability to track how resources are utilized. This helps you maximize the benefits of your savings plan while ensuring efficient resource management.
Cost data in the MegaBill is available for all cloud providers and services supported by Finout. Usage data is available for AWS, GCP, and Azure. You can learn more about usage types in your data here.
How To Use the MegaBill
By default, the MegaBill screen will display a graph and table of cost data for the cloud services and providers integrated with Finout.
To drill down into your MegaBill, you can use the following filtering options:
Apply a Saved View: If you have already saved a set of filters.
(Optional) You can select one or more of the filter by options to see a list of relevant views. For example, selecting AWS and GCP will show all saved views that include AWS and GCP resources or labels.
(Optional) Click See all to see a list of all the views.
Create a New View: Use the following filter options to best fit the MegaBill view to your needs:
Filters: Select the required cost center, for example, AWS, and select the required drill down, for example, services.
Advanced filters (Optional): Filter the view even further.
Time aggregation: Daily, weekly or monthly.
Report period.
Data type: Select either cost or usage.
Cost: Choose the cost type.
Usage: Choose the unit type and usage type.
Group By: Select the required grouping option.
X-Axis value: Select the value to be presented on the X-Axis.
Analyzing Your MegaBill Data
Once your MegaBill view has been created, you are presented with both a graph and table view of your chosen data.
MegaBill Graph
The following costs/usage data appears above the graph:
Total cost or usage: The total cost or usage for the selected resources and period.
Share of the total cost or usage: The selected filtered costs/usage as a percentage of the total MegaBill cost/usage.
Average daily cost or usage: The average cost/usage per time interval (day/week/month) for the resources selected in the filters for the specified period.
Note: The MegaBill graph view displays the top 30 daily cost values. Any additional values are grouped under "Others."
MegaBill Table
The following costs/usage data appears in the table:
Total: The total cost/usage for all the selected resources as well as for each resource for the current period (sorted from highest to lowest).
Previous period cost/usage: The costs for the previous period. values that have decreased appear in green, and values that have increased appear in red. An indication of the percentage increase or decrease in costs/usage appears alongside.
Percentage of cost/usage: The percentage of the total cost/usage
Note: The MegaBill table view displays the top 50 daily cost values. Any additional values are grouped under "Others."
Additional MegaBill Options
Clear a View
Click the Clear View icon at the top of the MegaBill page. This will revert the MegaBill to the default setting.
Use a View as a Dashboard Widget
Add a view to a dashboard by selecting Add to Dashboard, providing a widget name, and choosing an existing dashboard or creating a new one.
Edit a View Name
On the MegaBill page, select the views dropdown.
Click the three dots and then choose Rename view.
Delete a View
On the MegaBill page, select the views dropdown.
Click the three dots and then choose Delete view.
Note: Deleting a view will remove it for all users in the account.
Create or Update a View Based on an Existing One
On the MegaBill page, select the required view from the dropdown.
Update the view filters as required.
Click Save.
If you are creating a new view, enter a view name.
Click Save View.
-or-
On the MegaBill page, select the views dropdown.
Click the three dots and then click Clone view. The view is copied.
Edit the view, as required.
Click Save.
Remove Costs by Date
In the table view, click the three dots and turn toggle the dates off.
Download MegaBill Data
Download data from the graph or table in CSV format.
To download a CSV of the MegaBill graph:
Navigate to MegaBill.
Click
A CSV of the MegaBill graph is downloaded.
Note: The MegaBill graph view displays the top 30 daily cost values. Any additional values are grouped under "Others."
To download a CSV of the Megabill table with “Others” values:
In MegaBill, scroll to the table section at the bottom of the screen.
Click
and then click Download more values to CSV.
Note: The MegaBill table view displays the top 50 daily cost values. Any additional values are grouped under "Others." A downloaded CSV will have up to 10,000 values.
Transpose Data
Toggle data transposition in the table view by clicking the three dots and turning Transpose on or off.
MegaBill FAQ
Question: When there are too many data points on a stacked bar chart, how does FinOut handle them?
Answer: FinOut automatically groups the top values of the various views and the less significant values into the "Others" category.
- In the graph view - The top 30 cost values per day are presented, all other values are grouped as “others.”
- In the table view - The top 50 cost values per day are presented, all other values are grouped as “others.”
- Downloaded Data - The 1000 top cost values are presented, all other values are grouped as “others.”
Question: How does the "Others" category logic work?
Answer: The "Others" category is used when there are too many data points to display individually on the chart. The logic prioritizes displaying the most significant values separately by cost, while less significant values are grouped under "Others."
Question: When exporting to CSV, can I ungroup the "Others" category?
Answer: Yes, when exporting to CSV, you can ungroup the "Others" category so that data points are listed individually rather than being summarized under a single "Others" row. A downloaded CSV will have up to 10,000 values.
Still need help? Please feel free to reach out to our team at [email protected].