Boost FinOps with better resource tagging

Easily tag cloud spending data, allocate costs accurately, and report on usage across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and your Kubernetes containers

What is your cloud resource tagging strategy?

Cloud tagging is a fundamental aspect of cloud cost allocation and accountability. Most organizations find it challenging to implement and enforce a unified cloud tagging strategy, especially in multicloud environments.

Your showback model will be extremely difficult to defend if your tagging strategies aren’t perfect. You need a tool that will help you successfully implement a robust tagging strategy and accurately allocate 100% of your costs across all your accounts and environments.

Identify your cloud resource tagging maturity level

As a starting point, consider the following questions:

  1. Do users use tags to track costs? How about forecasting or operational support?
  2. Is your tagging governed by a unified strategy?
  3. Do you clearly communicate the strategy across the organization?
  4. Is your compliance at high levels?
  5. How do you deal with untaggable and untagged cloud resources?
  6. Are your tagging processes automated?
    Can users create resources without tags?
  7. Do users and business units have access to their cost and usage data?

An enforceable, automated, and clearly communicated tagging strategy is essential for complete cost allocation and accountability.

Leverage advanced tagging for FinOps success

With Anodot, anyone can easily implement a robust and unified tagging strategy that builds trust and accountability:

  • Normalize your tag keys using virtual tags
  • Normalize your tag values using views
  • Add linked account metadata using enrichment tags
  • Use tags to allocate ‌costs and map shared resources
  • Report by cost center and scope using linked accounts

Get a complete picture of your cloud usage

An integral part of FinOps is building a culture of collaboration among finance, engineering, and executive leadership to accelerate cloud-based business value. Understanding where costs are incurred, who generates them, and how they contribute value is the key to achieving this goal.
Anodot seamlessly combines all of your business’ cloud spend — across Azure, GCP, AWS, and Kubernetes — into a single dashboard, allowing you to easily allocate and report on costs using advanced tagging capabilities.

Streamline cloud cost allocation and reporting

Cost allocation can be tricky when assets are fragmented among teams, cloud providers, and containerized and non-containerized environments. Showback reports must be accurate, defensible, and easily understood if business units are to be held accountable for cloud costs.
Using Anodot’s advanced tagging features, FinOps teams can allocate spending data to relevant business units accurately and easily report on cloud spend including unit economics such as cost per team/feature/service and cost per customer.

Manage costs with data-driven insights

Multicloud services are complicated to manage and optimize. Identifying cost anomalies in real time is crucial for reducing costs, and the contextual information provided by tags is crucial to identifying the root cause and remediating the issue.
With Anodot, FinOps teams and engineers get real-time alerts when costs spike unexpectedly — along with resource metadata, tags, and root cause analysis so they can quickly figure out what went wrong and fix it.

Can you accurately map your cloud costs to your business?

Most cloud cost management tools support some type of filter grouping capability, which combines multiple tags and filters into one category to make cost exploration and allocation possible. The main problem with filter groups is overlapping costs that result in inaccurate reporting.

If two categories can contain the same costs, the total of the two categories will add up to more than 100% of all the costs. This also means that you can’t use categories to identify your unallocated costs.

That is why Anodot offers business mapping, a capability that empowers you to:

  • Accurately map spending data to relevant business dimensions without overlap
  • Assign shared costs equitably
  • Report cloud spend in a way that is customized to your organization’s needs

Take the next step

Schedule a discovery meeting to see how Anodot cloud cost management can ensure your FinOps success.