FinOps tools to consider for your organization

What are FinOps tools?

Software is vital for FinOps groups to understand cloud consumption, translate complex billing and invoices, correlate usage and costs with users or projects, maintain reports and alerts, and make decisions that can optimize cloud investments. Many FinOps tools are native to specific cloud providers, while generalized tools are offered by third-party vendors.

Although FinOps tools and more "traditional" cloud cost management tools can serve similar purposes, they are typically tailored to different audiences. Traditional cloud cost management is fundamentally a reporting function that shows which cloud resources an organization uses and how much those resources cost. The reports are generally seen by a small segment of management, and there are rarely any actionable items.

In contrast, software tools designed for FinOps initiatives cater to cross-discipline FinOps teams, with real-time insights and detailed reporting that are tailored to finance, engineering and other major disciplines. In addition, FinOps tools provide recommendations and actionable remediations and optimizations. This enables FinOps teams to see how those recommendations can potentially improve cloud performance and reduce costs.

FinOps tool features and capabilities

Tools designed for FinOps have a wide range features and functionality that can include the following:

• Granular tags. Tags enable FinOps teams to assign meaningful labels or buckets to cloud resources. Tags enable efficient budget allocations and chargeback, enabling teams to quickly identify -- and mitigate -- untagged items.
• Detailed views of cloud use. Every member of a FinOps team is concerned with different aspects of cloud utilization and costs. With FinOps tools, teams can create custom views related to specific cloud services and business departments.
• Reporting. FinOps teams rely on reporting features to sort complex cloud billing data. They can build billing dashboards for certain applications, departments, teams or roles.
• Performance metrics. Performance reports, such as scorecards and ratings, use aggregate metrics to report on efficiency. This lets FinOps teams quickly determine which departments or applications are most efficient in cloud deployment and spend -- and which business units might need more guidance.
• Anomaly detection. FinOps tools often combine performance metrics with strong analytics to establish a baseline for how the organization's cloud infrastructure normally works. This enables them to quickly detect unusual changes in spending and even provide some measure of automatic response or remediation.
• Budgeting. Forecasting and establishing cloud budgets can be difficult because of the large number of services, resources and pricing variables involved. With FinOps tools, businesses can correlate cloud accounts and services with financial reporting so stakeholders can readily follow budgets and spending trends based on business needs, such as by project, department or even user.
• Cost explorers. FinOps tools can include cost explorer functions that support visualizations of cloud usage and cost. Tools that deliver actionable insights for cloud cost optimization can offer proactive suggestions for addressing what-if scenarios in cloud use.

Overview of the top FinOps tools

There are many FinOps tools available today, each competing with the others while providing unique mixes of features and capabilities intended to address specific markets, verticals or business needs. Consequently, the choice of FinOps tool can be a surprisingly important matter for business, technology and finance leaders.

For example, choose simpler niche products and risk contending with too many of them over time. But choose a broader platform and you face higher costs, steeper learning curves and more complex integrations. It's important to identify potential candidates and then conduct detailed testing and evaluation before deciding on a specific tool or tool set.

The following summary includes two lists: native FinOps tools supplied by public cloud providers themselves and third-party FinOps tools. Generally, a native FinOps tool can provide granular details, excellent discovery, and high degrees of accuracy in usage and planning. But native tools may not provide some nice-to-have features and functions, and they are limited to the cloud resources and services offered by the specific provider.

Notable native FinOps tools or services include the following:

• AWS Budgets.
• AWS Compute Optimizer.
• AWS Cost and Usage Reports.
• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.
• AWS Cost Explorer.
• AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Azure Advisor.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit Savings Calculator.
• Azure pricing calculator.
• Azure Total Cost of Ownership Calculator.
• Google Cloud BigQuery.
• Google Cloud Billing reports.
• Google Cloud Billing.
• Google Cloud Monitoring.
• Google Cloud Cost Management.
• Google Cloud Looker Studio.
• Google Cloud FinOps hub.
• Microsoft Cost Management.
• Microsoft FinOps toolkit.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Budgets.
• OCI Cloud Cost Estimator.
• OCI Console Billing and Usage.
• OCI Console Dashboards.
• OCI Cost Analysis.
• OCI cost and usage reports.
• OCI FinOps Hub.

By comparison, third-party FinOps tools are developed by other vendors and paid for individually. Third-party tools can often integrate and expand many of the capabilities found in native tools, such as combining budgeting and usage, into a single platform that can support more than one cloud, including IaaS and SaaS, as well as in-house cloud resources and services. Notable third-party FinOps tools include the following:

• Apptio Cloudability.
• Cast AI.
• CloudCheckr.
• CloudZero.
• Datadog.
• Densify.
• Finout.
• Harness.
• Intel Tiber App-Level Optimization.
• Kubecost.
• nOps.
• ProsperOps.
• Spot by NetApp.
• Tanzu CloudHealth.
• Usage AI.
• Xosphere.
• Yotascale.
• Zesty.

FinOps tool tradeoffs

The sheer number of FinOps tools can pose a dilemma for business and technology leaders. The chosen tool needs to provide features and functions that provide a tangible, measurable benefit to FinOps teams and the business yet integrate with other enterprise tools and provide the versatility to support future requirements. It can be a tough choice -- it is exceedingly rare for one tool to do everything -- and once a tool is selected and implemented, it can be hard to change. To select a FinOps tool, consider the following pros and cons of native and third-party offerings.

Pros and cons of native FinOps tools

The benefits of native FinOps tools include the following:

• Simplicity. Cloud providers offer numerous tools, with each targeting a specific aspect of FinOps, such as billing or cost estimation. This enables a business to adopt as many native tools as needed and add or remove tools over time.
• Cost. Native tools can be low cost or even free, reducing the financial risks of adopting a particular tool. For example, Azure pricing calculator is free. AWS Budgets is free for the first two action-enabled budgets, and each additional action-enabled budget imposes a 10-cent daily cost.
• Speed. Simpler native tools can be fast and easy to implement, with far lower training and experience demands than third-party tools. These tools are maintained, patched and updated quickly by cloud providers.
• Objectivity. FinOps helps businesses make data-driven decisions. Business and technology leaders know what they're doing and what it costs and can identify clear and reasonable improvements or make adjustments as business needs change.
• Automation. The data collection and analytical capabilities of FinOps tools can provide a foundation for automation, enabling the tool itself to implement some of the optimizations and cost management policies established by the business.

However, native FinOps tools also pose several important limitations:

• Narrow functionality. Native tools may lack the integration and functionality that users require. For example, features for data sorting, visualization, reporting and other outputs may be narrow, limited or nonexistent. This might force the business to adopt and learn multiple tools to fill any functional gaps.
• Provider-specific. Native tools typically work only for the related cloud provider. This can make native tools a poor choice for multi-cloud environments, where resources and services are spread across two or more cloud providers. It can also lead to multiple systems that can be confusing and cumbersome to use together.
• Limited or overlooked cost-benefit consideration. FinOps tools can focus so much on cost management -- finding and cutting cloud costs -- that they overlook the business value of the underlying spend, such as cloud workload performance, processing or transactional speeds, UX and so on. Cheaper doesn't always mean better.

Pros and cons of third-party FinOps tools

Third-party tools tend to pose tradeoffs that are opposite those of native tools. Common benefits of third-party FinOps tools include the following:

• Broad functionality. Third-party software tools are commercial products in a highly competitive cloud marketplace and typically offer a broad assortment of features in a single package. For example, Apptio Cloudability handles tagging, varied views, business mapping, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, cost exploration and more, which means it could replace numerous native tools. In addition, commercial products can often integrate with other third-party tools, such as Atlassian Jira and PagerDuty.
• Multi-cloud potential. FinOps tools often support two or more major cloud providers. This enables FinOps teams to compare, plan and manage costs across cloud providers through the same tool and spot potential cost or performance management strategies across clouds.

But the benefits of third-party tools can be offset by several disadvantages:

• Greater complexity. A software tool with a broad feature set can be time-consuming and difficult to master. The nuances and relationships between FinOps features require significant attention to software setup and configuration, such as creating and organizing tags for cloud resources, projects, users and so on.
• Blind spots. You can't manage what you can't see. Third-party FinOps tools must be able to provide comprehensive -- ideally total -- discovery and metrics collection on every cloud service from multiple cloud providers. Any resource or service missed causes a blind spot in FinOps cloud usage and cost management. This makes tool evaluations and proof-of-principle projects critical before committing to a FinOps tool.
• Cost. Commercial third-party tools can carry a hefty price tag for the upfront purchase and recurring software maintenance agreements. There is no guarantee that the software's future roadmap adds -- or even retains -- desirable functions.

Ultimately, the choice of native or third-party FinOps tools depends on the size of the business, the maturity of the FinOps team, the level of multi-cloud adoption, and the FinOps features and functions required by the business.

Achieve team consensus before making a FinOps tool investment.

FinOps tool challenges and best practices

FinOps tools are not automatic. Success depends on overcoming challenges and following best practices. Organizations contemplating a FinOps initiative can boost the probability of long-term success with several of the following considerations:

• Involve the team in tool selection. Provide all cross-discipline team members ample opportunity to test and evaluate potential candidates. Achieve team consensus before making a FinOps tool investment.
• Future-proof the tool. Consider future capabilities that may not be vital today. Thinking ahead during tool selection can prevent a tool from becoming obsolete or requiring expensive replacement in the future.
• Evaluate the tool's value. The whole point of cloud FinOps is to translate thousands of confusing cost items into a cohesive picture of actual -- or practical -- cloud cost, performance and value. For example, what is this workload costing the business each month? How much value is the workload providing? Who is generating these costs? The FinOps tools should be capable of delivering these kinds of answers, but it might take some time to configure and grow into using the tool to prove its value.
• Consider tool deployment options. Whether it's available as SaaS, a cloud-ready container image or a traditional data center installation, decide how you want to deploy and maintain the tool. The FinOps team should work with IT operations to determine which resources to commit to the tool.
• Take time to set up the tool. FinOps tools are only valuable if they serve every constituent of the FinOps team. Ensure every team member receives the data that is relevant to their specific departmental priorities. To do this, configure and tailor the tool to meet each team member's unique need. This is often the most overlooked and underserved issue in FinOps tool adoption. Implementing a comprehensive tagging strategy, delivering regular reports, and using alerts and notifications are common examples.
• Justify the investment. A FinOps team might not adopt all the tool's features immediately, but use the tool to validate the value of FinOps -- and then systematically expand the tool's role. This quickly justifies the tool investment.

Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 20 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.