You've taken your first step with the Cloud, or you've even taken your first steps with your company. You have implemented the first steps of a FinOps method in your company.
You have communicated with all stakeholders on the impact of Cloud spending. Analyzing the expenses and processing the data is now something you master, your tagging plan is in place and you check that it is well followed, you have also identified the different optimization tracks to be monitored.
You may have consulted the FinOps training on the subject, which helps you with the first steps.
To sum up, you've got your Finops cap on and that's a very good thing, the hardest thing often is to get started.
Your first cycle has been successfully completed as advised by the Finops foundation in its manifesto in a cycle Inform > Optimize > Operate.
Now that you have seen the different levers of your actions, questions are coming to your desk about how to speed up certain subjects. Now how to automate tasks that allow it or to ensure a good continuity in your project.
In the end, you are wondering about FinOps tools.
We have identified 4 families of tools that can be useful for your Finops process:
1- Your Excel sheet :
Your first choice is of course to use the most famous office tool in the WORLD. We are of course talking about the Excel spreadsheet.
Only rarely will you find someone who will tell you that he never touched it.
Very handy tool to create your columns, tables, graphs, adapt the style and colors to your habits and culture of your company.
In short, it's a tool you know and whose sheets can be easily shared throughout the company, it's a very effective common base.
We have created an Excel spreadsheet with a sample multicloud reporting to start tracking your expenses on the following link:
2- Use your home BI tools :
Spreadsheets can also show their limits and in this case we need to use more powerful tools. They are dedicated to BI and data processing at higher volume and on which you can also do automation.
Especially when the dataset is very large or when data cross-referencing becomes important. The processing engine has to keep up.
These BI tools are designed specifically for data processing and reporting, they are very useful for FinOps.
Indeed, they often have the possibility to connect to a database on server or Cloud, some even have connectors like for Amazon S3 for example.
The user interface is also optimized for ease of understanding, and they also have a neat ergonomics to display reports or other graphs in an ergonomic way.
Often a few hours of training or practice are necessary to handle them effectively and get the most out of them, otherwise the frustration can be great.
We are talking about tools such as Power BI, Tableau Software or Qlik Sense.
3- How to use Clouds suppliers' tools properly
Cloud providers have not been sitting on their hands and also offer you tools to analyze expenses and better understand billing data with their own services.
The platforms that can be used for free are AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management or Billing from Google Cloud. There is no need to set any parameters to use them and you can get a lot of information quickly.
In addition, they are integrated into Cloud providers' consoles and do not require any licenses. This makes getting started very quickly and easily.
Another possibility is offered to you with Clouds products.
You can build your own data processing chain in the Cloud. Very often it is a question of preparing a storage space for data export, setting up a workflow to bring the data to a space where it can be queried, preparing queries and finally on the desired display.
These steps require some technical knowledge and Cloud, especially it also requires at least one day of implementation time. You will also pay for the associated products and usage like any other Cloud tools.
You can also find in the offers of the providers tools for recommendation, optimization and discount proposal to lower the amounts spent.
You can consult AWS' Well architecture Labs to understand how to implement this tool chain.
Get a tool ready on the shelf
The last possibility is to subscribe to a Finops solution, designed and optimized for the business.
Indeed, many tools exist on the market to do this work of data processing, reporting, governance tools and optimization recommendations.
They allow you to quickly get information with a minimum of setup time and technical knowledge. They often offer the possibility to be accompanied by a support service and to help you in your search for information.
It is also an opportunity to benefit from the professional experience of the subject without necessarily having to call on consulting resources.
and of course we are referring here to platforms of the same type as Lota.cloud, here is an example of our demo space below, if you want to see what it looks like, you can click here > DEMO
Conclusion
You have in front of you several choices that you have to make according to your budget, the time you have and your goal in your Finops process.
The choice of a tool is never fixed in time, it is good to start with low ambitions and understand if you are on the right path to get the information and automation you are looking for, then iterate to refine your needs over time;
Having the ability to question yourself to change strategy will be one of your strengths to make the most of each solution.
The solutions can also overlap when the need arises, for example having a simple reporting tool for stakeholders in the company and having advanced software for the centralized team that disseminates Finops practices.
To conclude the subject, we participated in 2 meetings where we discuss the subject of tools and their use cases.
If you want to have access to the replay we suggest you fill in the following form and we will send you the links by email.
To conclude the subject,
we participated in 2 Meetups where we discuss the subject of tools and their use cases.
If you want to have access to the replay we suggest you fill in the following form and we will send you the links by email.
