As onboarding and deployment become faster, self-service and automation have become a requirement; more than ever before, costs must remain predictable, attributable, and easy to report.

If you’re working to make log spend visible and fair across teams, you’re not alone—this is a common challenge in modern, and cloud native environments.

Assign cost centers and products

Dynatrace allows precise cost allocation for logs, so you can attribute log ingestion and retention to the right cost centers and cost products. This makes internal showback and chargeback straightforward.

Why this matters

• Cloud-native apps and microservices generate log sources rapidly, while shared platforms can blur ownership. Cost allocation brings clarity.
• Teams want autonomy and instant access, without surprises. Build accountability and trust with simplified and automated cost attribution.
• Service providers require accurate reporting for budgeting, audits, and governance purposes. Cost allocation makes it predictable and repeatable, with more than 60,000 cost allocation combinations out of the box and more available for our large enterprise customers, who are adopting this feature today at scale.

Cost optimization is a team sport

The era of budgets and cost optimization being a concern solely left to finance departments is a thing of the past. Teams are expected to own their budgets. Meaning that cost optimization is not a separate accounting artifact, but rather a shared accountability that each team is expected to contribute to.

Whether your teams offer services, applications, or infrastructure, they will want to leverage logs. Team-level accountability for log management begins with allocating log spend to individual products, owners, or any other method your FinOps practice uses for tracking.

With cost allocation for logs, you can take the non-disruptive route

You can leverage the established and defined annotations and labels of the source, for instance, directly from Kubernetes.

But there might be reasons you want to make that attribution at the processing stage:

• Your source might not be capable of providing annotations and tags.
• You don’t have the resources to configure each source individually to match attribution.
• You might want to take a centralized approach, rather than contacting each team individually.
• Your cost allocation requirements are too complex and require a script or a processing technology.

In Dynatrace OpenPipeline®, you can enrich your logs during processing. What may be tedious manual work elsewhere is now centralized and automated.

Whatever your requirements and expectations are, whether you need simple tagging or complex attribution rules, OpenPipeline is here to help.

Because cost optimization is a team sport, the output aligns perfectly with the most common FinOps formats, providing the exact granularity necessary to support enterprise-wide optimization initiatives.

What’s new with cost allocation

• Billing usage events for logs can now be enriched with dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product.
• Attribution of cost centers and products should best take place at source, but can be dynamically processed with OpenPipeline.
• You can mix and match both attributes or use them individually. This allows you to allocate costs by business unit and product/service, allowing for granular chargeback and showback.

Example: Chargeback and showback with Dynatrace cost attributes

Many organizations use chargebacks to create accountability and transparency for shared costs by charging internal departments for the resources or services they consume, based on actual usage. An effective way to implement this with Dynatrace is to use the dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product attributes together.

Consider a scenario where a central IT team provides observability services to multiple business units, such as Retail, Corporate Banking, and Wealth Management. Each unit runs several applications that generate logs through ingestion channels, such as OneAgent®, Log Ingest API, or OpenTelemetry integrations. To ensure accurate cost attribution, the IT team configures these log sources to automatically enrich each log with the appropriate cost center and product identifiers.

For example, logs generated by the Retail unit’s mobile banking app are enriched with dt.cost.costcenter: retail and dt.cost.product: mobile-app. This dual-tagging approach allows the central IT team to allocate log-related costs to the correct business unit and break down those costs by specific products or services within that unit. When billing usage events are enriched with these attributes, Finance teams can apply direct chargeback methods.

Optimize log spend with granular showback

Using the same attribution, IT teams can generate detailed reports showing how much each cost center is spending on log ingestion and retention, as well as which products drive that spend. These reports can be flexibly incorporated with other costs attributed to the same owners or products, such as query costs, using Lookup data in Grail®.

Now consider that same Retail unit. The granular attribution shows that the mobile app is responsible for 70% of its log spend. The team can now take targeted actions. For instance, it can reduce log verbosity in non-critical flows or adjust retention policies to optimize costs.

Meanwhile, central IT maintains full transparency and control over the shared observability platform. This centrally operated, data-driven chargeback model allows teams to operate autonomously without disruption, while aligning with FinOps principles.

Getting to the numbers

You can report and analyze cost allocation in multiple ways, depending on your audience, business requirements, workflows, and the tools you have.

• Dashboards: Crafting individual dashboards to visualize log ingestion and retention by cost center and product is one of Dynatrace’s key strengths. Individual filters, views, and visuals allow you to slice and dice custom dashboards for your teams.
• Notebooks: Explore and validate enriched billing usage events alongside Grail data for deeper analysis or ad‑hoc investigations. This route allows admins to align consumption data with log query insights of users in a shareable manner, as the results are stored. Non-admin users can view the results this way when the Notebook is shared with them.
• Account Management portal: Create cost management reports to track accrued costs and perform showback/chargeback at scale across business units and products, sent by email and downloadable in CSV format.
• Lookup data: Some organizations may prefer using lookup tables to allocate costs to their owners or products. This is a good fit for customers who already work with organizational structures that link owners with product and their respective cost centers. It can also serve as an additional support to track queries in your environments. Learn more about Lookup data in Grail.

With these views, IT and Finance can align on the same source of truth, driving targeted optimizations such as adjusting log verbosity in non-critical flows or tuning retention policies, while maintaining shared platform governance.

Get started: a guide for cost allocation

Let’s recap the best practices to get started successfully:

1. Inventory your log ingest channels and sources (OneAgent, API, OpenTelemetry, cloud/hyperscaler forwarders, log shippers).
2. Define attributes and assign labels for dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product at the source before ingestion, for example, in Kubernetes, OneAgent, or the API and OpenTelemetry configuration of your apps and services.
3. If updating agents or code changes aren’t feasible, define OpenPipeline rules to enrich during the process.
4. Send sample data, verify attributes configured in Grail, and confirm visibility using the Logs app or your existing dashboards.
5. Iterate by team/product, expand coverage, and standardize reporting in the Account Management portal.

New to Log Management & Analytics in Dynatrace?

Ready to make log costs clear, fair, and easy to report? Define your attributes, turn on enrichment, and give your teams the accountability and insights they need—without slowing them down.

If you’re already using Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS), you can instantly get started with logs today! Additional resources and downloads are available in our community examples space on GitHub.

We invite you to explore our Dynatrace Playground tenant at no cost or to start a free trial to ingest your first logs with cost allocation.

The post Cost allocation for logs: Precise, flexible, and non-disruptive appeared first on Dynatrace news.

In large enterprises, attributing IT costs to various cost centers, teams, or departments can be cumbersome and is typically only possible through significant manual overhead. Sometimes, introducing new IT solutions is delayed or canceled because a single business unit can’t manage the operating costs alone, and per-department cost insights that could facilitate cost sharing aren’t available.

In scenarios like these, automated and precise cost allocation can make a huge difference. Cost Allocation also unlocks new possibilities for strategic IT management, empowering you to align IT spending with your business priorities and serving as a fundamental prerequisite for adopting FinOps practices.

FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is a methodology combining finance, technology, and business teams to optimize cloud spending and maximize value in cloud environments. Costs and their origin are transparent, and teams are fully accountable for the efficient usage of cloud resources.

With the addition of the new Cost Allocation feature, the Dynatrace Platform Subscription now enables the application of FinOps, providing detailed cost transparency in near real-time (data is updated every 15 minutes), which is paramount to taking your strategic IT management to the next level.

Automatically allocate costs to teams, departments, or apps for full cost-transparency

In recent years, the Dynatrace platform expanded with many innovative features covering various use cases, from business insights to software delivery. These enhancements enable you to extract more value from your data, leading to wider adoption across enterprise departments. As Dynatrace now powers many different teams, the Cost Allocation feature helps you better control and prioritize your internal spending.

Incurred usage can be tagged at its origin based on your unique company structure. Also known as “chargeback” or “showback,” this functionality enables you to align every aspect of IT expenditure with your organizational framework, as you can now pinpoint exactly where and when costs occur within your organization.

This gives you a better understanding of financial impact and allows for granular strategic decision-making.

New insights into cloud spend enable strategic prioritization and business alignment

Dynatrace Cost Allocation is a groundbreaking upgrade for your cost management that provides many benefits:

• Business alignment: Cost Allocation ensures that every dollar you spend on IT resources is directly linked to your business priorities.
• Enhanced cost transparency: Enabling detailed tracking and reporting of expenses across various departments and products gives unparalleled visibility into IT costs. This granular level of transparency helps identify cost drivers, monitor usage patterns, and uncover opportunities for cost savings.
• Increased budget control: Cost Allocation empowers organizations to clearly understand their current costs and resource usage for different cost centers and products.
• Better planning and forecasting: By analyzing historical data, organizations can forecast future spending and adjust their budgets, promoting a disciplined approach to IT financial planning.
• Easier Dynatrace rollout across organizations: DPS enhanced by Cost Allocation allows departments to extract value from the Dynatrace platform while only paying for what they need. By leveraging improvements in Identity and Access Management, admins can ensure that Dynatrace users only have access to the data they need to do their jobs.

Explore and visualize your cost data

Allocated costs are stored in the Dynatrace Grail™ data lakehouse, which enables you to utilize the entirety of the Dynatrace platform to analyze, explore, and visualize your data. Start with our downloadable dashboard and customize it to your needs.

Use Davis® AI for accurate forecasting or to automatically catch unexpected spending deviations. You can also set up tailored and automated alerts utilizing the Davis Anomaly Detection app. Our comprehensive suite of tools ensures that you can extract maximum value from your billing data, efficiently turning insights into action.

You can also create individual reports using Notebooks—or export your data as CSV—and share it with your financial teams for further processing.

Set up Cost Allocation

Implementing Dynatrace Cost Allocation is straightforward and can be tailored to fit the unique needs of any organization. The process involves configuring cost center and product fields, setting up an allow list for valid values within account management, and using Dynatrace’s powerful API to extract and analyze cost data.

Best practices include regularly reviewing cost allocation reports, ensuring all relevant expenses are captured accurately, and refining budget limits based on usage trends.

Head over to Dynatrace Documentation to learn more about how to set up cost allocation in your environment.

Conclusion

Dynatrace Cost Allocation is essential for enterprises that seek to align IT spending with business goals, achieve cost transparency, and maintain strict budget control. By leveraging cost allocation, organizations can optimize their IT investments, drive financial efficiency, and support their overarching business strategy.

With regular updates and comprehensive dashboards, businesses can maintain a clear view of their IT spending, ensuring accountability and fostering a culture of cost consciousness.

Get started with Cost Allocation

Existing Dynatrace customers with a Dynatrace Platform Subscription can integrate Cost Allocation into their IT management strategy anytime, achieving unparalleled transparency and budget control across critical areas. Read more to learn how to activate Cost Allocation in your environment, then download the ready-made Cost Allocation dashboard from our dedicated community user group and start monitoring your costs.

With the release of Dynatrace SaaS version 1.303, Cost Allocation is available for host monitoring, security protection, and security analytics. Support for additional capabilities will be added in the future. Our documentation provides more details and will help you better understand the existing limitations.

If you want to learn more about Cost Allocation and experience the functionality live, have a look at our Observability Lab episode with Andreas Grabner and Sophie Mayerwieser: Cloud Cost Transparency with Dynatrace fine-grained Cost Allocation.

The post Level up your strategic IT management with fully cost-transparent, fine-grained Dynatrace Cost Allocation appeared first on Dynatrace news.

As a technology executive, you’re aware that observability has become an imperative for managing the health of cloud and IT services. You may not be aware of how much untapped value is waiting to be unlocked through the right observability platform. Data with context can improve your ability to deliver on your goals, modernize your organization, and accelerate business transformation.

The Dynatrace platform enables executives to drive change faster, increase IT and R&D productivity, reduce business risks, optimize costs, and decrease carbon footprint. These outcomes are made easy through the platform’s unique ability to turn data into answers and action, in contextual, real-time, and cost-effective ways that were previously impossible.

Unearthing a goldmine of value

As founder and CTO of Dynatrace, I must constantly drive change. I also have the privilege of being “customer zero” for our platform, which enables me to continually discover where Dynatrace can deliver on more use cases to drive my team’s productivity and innovation. Change is my only constant.

Realizing that executives from other organizations are in a similar situation to my own, I want to outline three key objectives that Dynatrace’s powerful analytics can help you deliver, featuring nine use cases that you might not have thought possible.

Drive innovation

To remain competitive, executives are seeking productivity gains while simultaneously driving modernization initiatives. Observability data presents executives with new opportunities to achieve this, by creating incremental value for cloud modernization, improved business analytics, and enhanced customer experience.

However, technology executives face a significant challenge getting answers in time, as their needs have evolved to real-time business insights that enable faster decision-making and business automation. Exploding volumes of data must be prepared, catalogued, stored in multiple, disconnected tools. The data must then be retrieved from data lakes and converted into rigid schemas. It can take data analysts months to extract insights and answer executives’ questions using these approaches.

With the latest advances from Dynatrace, this process is instantaneous. Unlike anything before, contextual analytics in Dynatrace provides answers to any question at any time, instantaneously. That’s because it does not require any pre-prepared schemas, and access to cold/hot storage is fully automatic and with zero latency. Moreover, it is fast, powered by its massively parallel processing data lakehouse.

As a result, organizations can reduce complexity, effort, and processing time to run powerful business analytics on exabytes of data in real time. Dynatrace enables executives to drive a stronger, data-driven organization by increasing automation and productivity.

Mitigate risk

To cope with serious business risks —including major outages, security breaches, or missing out on realizing AI’s value — executives require a modern, proactive approach. Dynatrace analytics capabilities, powered by hypermodal AI, enable executives to drive improved availability, strengthened security compliance, and heightened confidence in AI initiatives.

Executives are shifting to proactive risk management, aiming to prevent availability issues and expedite remediation. However, AI introduces new risks, such as increased software complexity, accelerated cyber-attacks, and potential regressions from rapid releases. Siloed teams and the reliance on disparate tools lead to manual intervention and delays, which are unsustainable given tightening regulations including DORA, NIS2, and the SEC’s four-day reporting rule.

Dynatrace uniquely solves this conundrum, enabling executives to use a new generation of AIOps and SecOps to predict and mitigate risk, rather than reacting to availability and security incidents. It does this by combining causal, predictive, and generative AI to uncover the deep context of issues using a unified source of observability and security data. Automated root-cause analysis and real-time risk analysis are only two examples that help executives get closer to the vision of self-healing operations and security.

Optimize cost

With the constant pressure to do more with less — or much more, much faster — executives must control cost and complexity. Dynatrace can help executives to achieve these goals by reducing tool sprawl, driving cost optimization, and meeting their sustainability goals.

Optimizing costs is a proven way to free up budgets for innovation. Young talent (our future executives) has a valid interest beyond making more money, as sustainability and green coding are vital to protecting both their own and our future.

As new waves of technology roll over us, executives are struggling to keep tool sprawl under control. Tool sprawl not only goes deep into our pockets, but also hampers consistency and productivity. Tens or even hundreds of DIY and commercial tools are being used to handle logs, metrics, traces, security events, and vulnerabilities all in their own way.

Insights are therefore dispersed in a multitude of data lakes, storage systems, and reporting platforms. This is inefficient and creates avoidable risks. The principle of “keep it simple, stupid” is more important than ever, translating to consolidating tools and making processes more consistent at higher grades of scalability and automation.

Dynatrace is uniquely placed to meet this need as it consolidates tools, storage, data, processing, and automation capabilities together in a single, unified platform. This reduces the number of moving parts and eliminates process inconsistencies, driving team productivity and increasing software delivery quality and security.

As a result, organizations can streamline processes by moving towards platform engineering and developer self-service portals to unburden engineers while increasing software quality and security at a higher consistency.

The post Nine ways technology executives can get significant business value with the right observability platform appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Overseeing cloud spend and IT resource allocation has always been a priority for CIOs. Yet, in 2023, 82% of cloud decision makers reported that managing cloud spend was their top challenge, according to one source. In response, many organizations are adopting a FinOps strategy.

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline focused on enabling organizations to get maximum business value from their cloud spend. Following FinOps practices, engineering, finance, and business teams take responsibility for their cloud usage, making data-driven spending decisions in a scalable and sustainable manner. FinOps aligns technology initiatives with business objectives while maintaining financial transparency and accountability to reduce unnecessary cloud spend and lower costs.

Empowering teams to manage their FinOps practices, however, requires teams to have access to reliable multicloud monitoring and analysis data. In a Dynatrace Perform 2024 session, Kristof Renders, director of innovation services, discussed how a stronger FinOps strategy coupled with observability can make a significant difference in helping teams to keep spiraling infrastructure costs under control and manage cloud spending.

Primary reasons for runaway cloud costs

Organizations are paying too much for too little return on their cloud investments for a few reasons, including the following:

Cloud waste. The primary factor that most IT and business professionals are aware of—but may not completely grasp—is how to control cloud waste. Teams provision and purchase many cloud services that end up underused or completely unused.

Wrong-sized resources. Aligning workload types and sizes with instance performance and capacity requirements is essential to keep costs down.

Unnecessary data transfer. Cloud vendors often charge data egress fees when data shifts from their platforms or between regions. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) charges for data transfer between Amazon EC2 instances within the same region.

On-demand payment agreement. On-demand payment is the most expensive pricing option. Flexible pricing models that offer discounts based on commitment or availability can greatly reduce cloud waste. This includes spot instances such as unused cloud capacity that’s available at a discounted price.

Suboptimal architecture design. Poorly designed cloud solutions can become costly over time. For example, poorly written code can consume a lot of resources, or an application can make unnecessary calls to cloud services.

How to implement an observability approach to FinOps to lower costs

An observability approach to FinOps involves applying financial management principles to monitoring and analyzing cloud resources and spending. It provides visibility, accountability, and optimization opportunities within the context of observability practices in cloud computing environments. This enables organizations to effectively manage cloud spend and drive cost optimization to achieve maximum ROI.

The following five practices are crucial to consider when implementing an observability approach to FinOps.

1. Cost allocation

The first step is to determine who—or which application—is spending what. Assign an owner—whether it’s a financial owner, business unit, or cost center—to each application. You can then start pulling that information into the observability platform. When each team’s cost is visible, it’s possible to identify who, what, or where the issue is if costs unexpectedly skyrocket. This visibility allows an organization to allocate costs and look at unallocated costs to drive optimizations when and where needed.

Are there rogue servers running in the environment where ITOps, CloudOps, or another team can’t assign or identify who’s financially responsible for it? This awareness is important when the goal is to drive cost-conscious engineering.

2. Proactive cost alerting

Proactive cost alerting is the practice of implementing automated systems or processes to monitor financial data, identify potential issues or anomalies, ensure compliance, and alert relevant stakeholders before problems escalate. Setting up and monitoring alerts for various metrics—such as resource usage, cost trends, budget thresholds, or deviations from expected spending patterns—can help FinOps teams stay ahead of unexpected expenses or budget overruns.

This proactive alerting involves combining many technologies that already exist in the Dynatrace platform. An organization can ask Dynatrace, “Have you seen any oversized servers over X amount of time?” Dynatrace automated intelligence Davis CoPilot can see all dependencies and identify those servers. You can then use that ownership capability to find out who this server belongs to and notify that person.

Hyperscaler cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform can do this, too. They can send a notification saying, “This server is oversized.” But Dynatrace goes further.

Dynatrace looks inside the machine and immediately tells you what’s running on it. So, the person who then receives the ticket also knows what’s running on that server.

3. Resource utilization monitoring

A FinOps observability approach involves monitoring cloud resource utilization to identify inefficiencies and optimization opportunities. Observability tools can provide insights into resource utilization metrics, such as CPU usage, memory usage, and network throughput. By analyzing these metrics in conjunction with cost data, organizations can identify underutilized resources that can be downsized or terminated to reduce costs.

4. Forecasting and budgeting

A FinOps strategy involves forecasting future cloud costs and budgeting accordingly to align spending with business goals and objectives. Observability tools can provide historical cost data and usage trends, enabling organizations to accurately forecast future spending. By incorporating financial forecasting into observability practices, organizations can proactively manage costs and avoid budget overruns.

5. Carbon impact monitoring

Carbon impact monitoring tracks, measures, and analyzes the carbon emissions of an organization’s activities. This concept is closely related to environmental sustainability and corporate responsibility, as organizations seek to minimize their carbon footprints and mitigate their effects on climate change.

Carbon impact optimization is similar to optimizing from a financial perspective. The Dynatrace Carbon Impact app delivers recommendations to enforce and validate sustainable engineering, such as oversized servers running on your infrastructure, or a server used for an underutilized application. It ties that cost and carbon growth to your business, using the six pillars of a well-architected framework as a guideline.

Drive your FinOps strategy with Dynatrace

In the simplest sense, FinOps is about optimizing and using cloud resources more efficiently. It’s about ensuring the cloud and IT resources you have provisioned are used completely and that your applications, transactions, and processes are using only necessary cloud computing resources.

Dynatrace can help you achieve your FinOps strategy using observability best practices. With critical insights into how much you’re spending and whether your costs are aligned with your business goals, you can optimize your environment across all clouds and make informed decisions to reduce cloud spend and your IT carbon footprint.

To learn more, watch the Dynatrace Perform 2024 breakout session, “Driving your FinOps strategy with Dynatrace.”

The post Driving your FinOps strategy with observability best practices appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Spiraling cloud architecture and application costs have driven the need for new approaches to cloud spend.

Nearly half (49%) of organizations believe their cloud bill is too high, according to a CloudZero survey. Further, a Flexera report found that small to medium-sized businesses spend approximately $1.2 million on cloud computing, while large enterprises shell out upward of $12 million annually.

That’s where FinOps can help. This public cloud management discipline provides IT, DevOps, CloudOps, finance, and business teams with continuous cost optimization tools and accurate accounting of cloud resources. The result is smarter, data-driven solutions designed to manage cloud spend.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is a cloud financial management philosophy and practice that strives to control the cost of cloud adoption strategies without restricting the scope of cloud resources.

FinOps helps engineering, development, finance, and business teams meet critical key performance indicators (KPIs) and fulfill service-level agreements. Today, many global industries implement FinOps, including telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, and energy conservation, as well as most Fortune 50 companies.

This practice isn’t just about reducing costs. FinOps aims to support the best cloud spend that maximizes the value of all necessary computing resources.

What are the key principles of FinOps?

To ensure the best results, it’s important to establish and adhere to the following key FinOps principles across all teams and departments:

• Cross-team FinOps visibility. Ensure all teams have granular visibility into cloud usage and spending in real time, with costs mapped to business units for better reporting and budget allocation.
• Ownership of cloud usage. Establish continuous, automated policy-based compliance for all teams throughout all cloud platforms. This helps to prevent overprovisioning, underutilization of reserved instances, and hidden costs.
• FinOps company culture. Create optimization strategies with realistic goals for each team. Additionally, include benchmarks for stakeholders and best practices that support the anticipated growth of the organization as a whole.

FinOps becomes more critical as organizations grow

The value of FinOps lies in its potential to move organizations toward financial success with smart, cost-efficient cloud spend implemented from day one.

A McKinsey & Company FinOps study indicated that “enterprises often don’t develop at-scale FinOps capabilities until their spending on cloud architecture reaches $100 million per year.”

But, in reality, that means organizations are waiting far too long before they institute financial optimization measures. Taking this common, fiscally conservative, wait-and-see approach can end up being more costly. It involves a greater effort to transition teams from a data center approach to a cost-effective cloud consumption mentality.

The study also found that many FinOps teams focus largely on operational tasks such as tagging — i.e., attaching a label on an instance or product to identify and group resources in a common entity to lower costs — and contract management. High-impact strategic cloud initiatives, however, may be as valuable or more so.

A few examples of FinOps strategic cloud initiatives include the following:

• Cloud-unit economics. Assess direct revenues and costs of every transaction in the cloud on a per-unit basis to reveal the business value of cloud spend.
• Consumption forecasting. Take the necessary steps to evaluate and predict future cloud spend based on existing usage rates and future anticipated peak or decreased loads.
• FinOps behavioral change management. Establish a FinOps culture that supports buy-in from all stakeholders, as well as metrics that all teams understand and use. It’s also important to provide training for engineers, developers, chief information officers, and any others as needed.

Public, private, and hybrid cloud computing platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud provide access, development, and management of cloud applications and services. They also offer FinOps strategies and tips to help companies identify cost-saving opportunities and maximize cloud investments.

Maximizing the benefits of FinOps

In addition to optimizing cloud usage and cost efficiency, FinOps can provide several benefits, such as the following:

• driving business innovation by freeing resources for new projects;
• enabling trust and increased collaboration among teams;
• preventing cloud sprawl and overprovisioning of cloud resources; and
• improving financial responsibility of teams and the organization as a whole.

The challenges of implementing FinOps

FinOps is not devoid of organizational pushback and development obstacles. There are some challenges with implementing FinOps.

Aligning technology and finance teams

Engineers focus on cloud computing, innovation, and moving workloads to the cloud, while finance teams focus on minimizing costs. FinOps requires both teams to work together to develop goals for cloud utilization and KPIs to measure success or the need for improvement.

Motivating teams to take action

Developers need the freedom to “fail fast” and take risks without worrying about cloud costs to improve continuous integration and continuous delivery processes. Sharing cloud spend and creating important cost-efficient solutions are key to achieving companywide initiatives that can accelerate FinOps buy-in and compliance.

Allocating shared costs

Unallocated shared costs hinder the transparency and accounting accuracy of cloud spending. Identify shared costs and predict the spreading of cost in the total budget for each team.

Reducing waste and unused resources

Workloads that exceed agreed-upon capacity and unused or orphan resources — such as a disk not attached to an instance — increase cloud waste. Adopting observability and monitoring tools can effectively detect and eliminate unused resources to prevent waste.

Using observability in your FinOps strategy

A unified cloud observability and intelligence platform provides visibility into the use of cloud resources in real time. It automatically allocates resources or eliminates unused ones with assistance from machine learning and AI, as needed, based on demand. An intelligent observability platform also autonomously identifies unusual costs or overspending with cost anomaly detection for valuable, in-depth FinOps insight to help manage cloud spend.

Learn more about Dynatrace intelligent observability for the modern cloud with Davis AI. And find out how it can help get your FinOps practice up and running from the start.

The post What is FinOps? How to keep cloud spend in check appeared first on Dynatrace news.