FinOps

Dashboard Framework Enhancements

The platform's Dashboard Framework has been significantly upgraded to provide an even more powerful FinOps analysis experience. These enhancements ensure deeper insights, faster decision-making, and greater customization for both partners and enterprises.

Cloud Provider Specific Dashboards & Filters

• For users focusing on a single cloud provider, we’ve introduced provider-specific FinOps dashboards for AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. These dashboards offer detailed visibility into costs and financial trends, ensuring that partners and enterprises can effectively manage cloud spend using native cloud terminology.

Multi-Cloud Dashboards & Filters

• For those managing multi-cloud environments, our new Multi-Cloud FinOps Dashboards provide a unified financial view across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. These dashboards utilize standardized terminology from the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS project, ensuring a consistent and streamlined financial governance experience.
  • FOCUS 1.0 Standardization ensures cloud cost metrics, charge categories, and cost allocation structures remain uniform across providers.
  • Enables seamless cross-cloud analysis, improving transparency and multi-cloud financial governance.

Filter Management at Dashboard Scope

• Enhanced Filter Management for dashboards empowers users with greater control over filter visibility and functionality. By managing both Filter Keys and Filter Values, dashboard creators can deliver highly tailored and simplified experiences for their users.
  • Control Filter Key Visibility: Users can hide specific filter keys to streamline the dashboard experience and minimize distractions. For example, users can exclude fields like Instance Type, Operating System, or Region if irrelevant to the dashboard's purpose.
  • Restrict Filter Values: Define which values within a filter are visible to users. For instance, users can hide all charge types except Usage for clarity in financial dashboards or display only specific tag values like Production while hiding others.

Visual Subscribe

• The new Visual Subscribe feature enhances the delivery of FinOps insights by enabling users to subscribe to dashboards, widgets, and/or views to customize and automate the distribution of tailored cloud financial data to stakeholders on a recurring basis (daily, weekly, etc.).
• This helps customers to keep teams informed and aligned with cost and usage insights without requiring regular portal logins and/or by delivering tailored FinOps insights through automated PDF reports.

Manage Views

• Manage Views enhances user experience by allowing the saving and customization of page views, eliminating the need to re-select filters and settings each time a page is visited. This feature addresses the time-consuming process of manually configuring views, providing a more efficient workflow.
• Users can export dashboards with both configured and standard views and conveniently import them using the import functionality. Additionally, users have the option to create private views that are not included in the exported data.

Dashboard Permissions Enhancements

• We have enhanced the permissions feature to include permissions for custom roles and user groups, which were previously limited to system roles, as well as add the Subscribe permission to the existing set of role grants (e.g. Read, Edit, Share). This update allows for more granular control and flexibility in managing user access and capabilities.
  • Custom Role Permissions: Assign permissions to custom roles, not just system roles while sharing dashboards across multiple tenants.
  • User group Permissions: Assign permissions to user groups while sharing across tenants.
  • Subscription Permissions: Grant or deny permissions for roles to set up subscriptions. Users with roles that have this permission can create subscriptions for system views or their own custom views (provided they also have Edit permission).

Widget Framework v2 Enhancements

The platform's Widget Framework has undergone a series of transformative updates, bringing advanced capabilities to FinOps dashboards. These updates provide enhanced functionality and flexibility, catering to both power users and basic users and ensuring a more efficient and insightful FinOps dashboard experience.

The enhancements are described in more detail below:

• Widget Drilldowns: Use drill-down functionality to dive deeper into your data directly from dashboard widgets to get more granular insights.
• Group By: Organize data by various dimensions to gain a centralized and cohesive view directly in your widgets, simplifying comparative analysis.
• Advanced Table Views: Support complex data visualization with advanced tables that incorporate group-by functionality, offering a richer perspective on cloud usage and cost.
• Swap X-Y Axis: Users can now swap the X and Y axes in widget charts, enabling dynamic visualization that adapts to their analysis needs.
• Query-Based Filtering for Power Users: Focus on specific widgets and slice and dice data for deeper analysis, in addition to global filters.
• Simple Non-Filter View for Basic Users: Hide filter visibility at the widget level to reduce complexity for executives and basic users.

Newly Added FinOps Widgets

New FinOps Widgets have been added to elevate dashboards with advanced capabilities, built on an enhanced data model. These widgets improve data visibility and empower users to extract deeper insights, enhance financial governance, and drive better decision-making.

Cost and Spend Tracking:

• Cost Summary: Provides a comprehensive summary view of cloud costs with improved granularity and flexibility to summarize costs by various attributes. Ex: Total cloud spends or spend by specific cloud, Average, min, max cloud spends and period. Top Group By's: Tenant, Service, Region etc.
• Cost Trend: Improved visibility into cost trends with enhanced analytics to filter, group by and drill down various attributes.
• Cost Variation: Analyze changes in cloud spend over time to identify trends and anomalies.
• Cost Spend by Dimension: View costs by specific dimensions. Drill-down further into costs across dimensions like Service, Region, or Account.
• Cost Variation by Dimension: View cost variation by selected dimension/attribute. Drill-down into cost variations across dimensions like Service, Region, or Account.
• Spend by Top 10 Resources: Identify the top resources contributing to spend for more focused cost/usage optimization.
• Spend by Hierarchy (Account Type): Break down spend by Cloud provider Account type hierarchies. Ex: View cost of AWS Organization and its Organizational Units or Azure EA, its departments, accounts

Commitment and Budget Management:

• Azure EA/MCA - MACC Commitment Tracking: Track detailed MACC commitment usage and commitment by different accounts.
• Azure EA - MACC Commitment Burndown: Visualize commitment consumption over time.
• AWS - EDP Commitment Tracking: Analyze EDP commitment utilization across multiple accounts.
• AWS - EDP Commitment Burndown: Assess remaining balance and consumption rate for AWS commitments.

FinOps Dashboard – Query-Based Filters

Query-based filter support has been added for advanced FinOps visibility, enabling deeper and more flexible data analysis across Dashboards, Billing Inventory, and Cost Anomaly features. These advanced filtering capabilities empower users with unparalleled control and precision in their FinOps analysis, enhancing trend management, slicing, and dicing the data by various attributes to provide comprehensive financial clarity.

• Granularity Filtering for Trend Analysis: Switch between day, month, and year-level granularity to tailor trend analysis.
• Comprehensive Cost Metric Support: Visualize costs using cloud-specific metrics like List Cost, Unblended, Net Unblended, Amortized, and Net Amortized and Contracted cost.
• Expanded Filter Depth with CUR Data: Access backend Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data through a flexible filter model consisting of 30+ filter attributes like Region, Charge category, AWS Instance type, resource Tag keys etc.
• Integrated Platform Filters: Refine data by tenants, cloud account status, multi-cloud hierarchies, and tags. Combine platform and cloud provider-specific filters for maximum flexibility.
• Custom Fiscal Year Settings: Align data analysis with your organization's fiscal calendar using Time Presets.
• Billing Mode (time presets): Align data analysis with cloud provider billing periods as per the billing data from cloud providers.

FinOps Dashboard – Cost Forecasting Enhancements

Enhanced Spend Forecasting has been added to empower users with a flexible and precise tool to forecast cloud spend, enabling more confident financial decisions. Designed to meet diverse forecasting requirements, it delivers improved accuracy through advanced AI algorithms and supports multi-dimensional analysis for tailored insights.

• Flexible Forecasting Across Multiple Dimensions: Generate forecasts for various business contexts, including tenants, cloud accounts, regions, tags, and charge types.
• Context-Aware Forecasting: Forecasts adapt dynamically based on applied filters, ensuring insights remain relevant to the specific business context.
• Extended Forecasting Horizons: Plan with monthly granularity up to 13 months ahead and daily granularity up to 14 days into the future, supporting better financial strategies and resource allocation. Based on the forecast requested, the platform auto adjusts look back period up to 12 months of daily granularity data to get the best median accuracy.
• AI-Powered Accuracy: Advanced AI algorithms enhance accuracy, aligning forecasts with actual trends and providing reliable predictions that minimize uncertainty.
• Contextual Flexibility: Easily adjust forecasts by including or excluding specific costs or credits to meet reporting and budgeting objectives, ensuring tailored and actionable insights.

FinOps – Standardized Dashboards

• To further enhance standardization, this release introduces a comprehensive set of pre-configured dashboards, ensuring that both partners and end customers can get started quickly with consistent financial insights across cloud environments.
  • Cost Posture (Account and Tenant View) - Existing cost posture has been replaced with new Cost Posture dashboard. A specific dashboard has been created for customers which only allows Account and Tenant View.
  • Cost Posture (Admin View) - Existing cost posture has been replaced with new Cost Posture dashboard for admins. A specific dashboard has been created for tenant and account admins which only allows to view various account type hierarchies to get a view across multiple accounts and customers.
  • AWS Cost Explorer – Provides comprehensive visibility into AWS costs with trend analysis, forecasting, and actionable insights for Distributors, MSPs, and Customers.
  • AWS Management Account Explorer – Centralized view of total AWS charges across managed accounts, enabling financial optimization and EDP balance tracking.
  • Azure Cost Explorer – Delivers insights into Azure cost trends, forecasts, and analytics to help stakeholders manage cloud spending effectively.
  • Azure Enterprise Agreement (EA) Explorer – Offers MSPs and LSPs a consolidated view of Azure EA and optionally MACC charges to enhance customer service and cost management.
  • Azure CSP Direct Explorer – Provides CSP Direct Partners with insights into Azure costs, customer billing, and partner margins for financial transparency.
  • GCP Cost Explorer – Enables detailed cost analysis of GCP environments with trend insights, forecasting, and actionable cost management strategies.
  • OCI Cost Explorer – Offers deep visibility into OCI cloud spending with trend tracking, forecasting, and optimization opportunities.
  • Multi-Cloud Cost Posture Explorer – Consolidates cloud expenditure data across multiple platforms for holistic cost analysis and optimization.
  • CFO/Executive Dashboard – Provides cloud FinOps insights for executives, covering investment analysis, cost control, budgeting, and forecasting.

Support for Additional Cost Metrics

To enhance the platform’s ability to assist its users in financial decision-making, and cost management, support for additional cost metrics has been added as part of cost ingestion, as well as appearing in dashboards and Billing Inventory.

The additional cost metrics supported are listed below:

Fiscal Year Settings for Visibility

• Fiscal Year Settings have been added for Visibility, which allows organizations to configure fiscal year dates at the account or tenant level, providing essential visibility for finance teams.
• This feature is crucial for partners with multiple regions, offering a unified view while allowing flexibility for customers to have their own fiscal settings. These settings are available as presets in visibility capabilities wherever time range filters are used.
• Tenant-level settings override account-level settings for most roles except account admin, while users can define fiscal start and end dates with notes, and fiscal presets adjust based on tenant or account-level configurations.

Organizational Currency & Currency Exchange Rate Plan

• The new Currency Exchange Rate Plan feature allows Account Admins to convert multiple currencies into a single Organizational Currency, enabling distributors and MSPs to analyze cloud spend across customers with different currencies.
• Partners can configure organizational currencies for multiple customers, while direct customers can also create their own organization currency for their tenant.
• This feature is integrated into dashboards & billing inventory. Exchange rates are managed for specific time periods, and the option is enabled only when all related currency rates are set. It supports a single target currency per tenant, with Account Master level currency settings available.

FOCUS Vocab Support on Multi-Cloud Dashboard

• The Multi-Cloud Dashboard now supports FOCUS-compliant vocab, enhancing flexibility, standardization, and FinOps reporting.
• Users can choose between a Multi-Cloud Dashboard or a Single-Cloud Dashboard when creating a new view. Selecting multi-cloud ensures data is displayed in FOCUS Vocab for consistent cross-cloud analysis, while Single-Cloud allows users to select a specific provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI) to view data in the respective provider’s terminology.
• This update streamlines financial operations, ensuring better cost visibility and alignment across cloud environments.

Billing Inventory: Comprehensive Cost Visibility & Analysis

• The Billing Inventory feature provides detailed cost visibility across AWS, Azure, and GCP & OCI, enabling users to analyze resource-level costs, discounts, reservations, marketplace charges, and support fees. It offers multi-dimensional filtering and analysis, helping organizations track and optimize cloud expenses efficiently.
• It can also be used by Finance personas for billing reconciliation, which enables a truly powerful capability to a central view that support multiple cloud providers and cloud account types.

Billing Inventory – Inventory Summary

• The Inventory Summary sub-feature provides aggregated cost insights, allowing users to group, filter, and analyze cloud costs at a high level before diving into granular details. Key capabilities include:
  • Flexible Grouping & Aggregation by provider, region, charge type, and custom tags.
  • Advanced Filtering by time range, service type, and resource category.
  • Cost Trend & Change Analysis with percentage and absolute cost variations.
  • Exporting & Custom Views for seamless reporting and analysis.

Billing Inventory – Inventory Details

• For power users and finance teams, the Detailed View provides:
  • Line-item cost breakdowns across individual resources, credits, discounts, and other charge types.
  • Multi-dimensional filtering to get to the details that is required quickly.
  • Charge type and discount analysis, helping businesses understand true cloud costs.
  • Cross-cloud reconciliation tools, ensuring consistency across different billing models.

Cost Anomaly 2.0

Cost Anomaly 2.0 brings enhanced transparency, deeper cost visibility, and more control to anomaly detection, enabling organizations to proactively manage unexpected cloud spend fluctuations.

Key Enhancements:

• Enhanced anomaly detection at cloud account and resource category levels.
• Drill down into potential root causes with contextual cost visibility at the resource level costs.
• Custom thresholds for cost anomaly detection, reducing noise and irrelevant alerts.
• Flexible notifications – choose between real-time alerts or daily summaries.
• Reject Anomaly Support – Users can now reject specific anomalies, ensuring only relevant cost insights are retained for analysis.

These enhancements ensure that FinOps practitioners can quickly detect, analyze, and act on anomalies, optimizing cost governance with precision and efficiency.

Enhanced Cost Optimization: Resource Exclusion & Time-Bound Rejection

• The platform now enables users to exclude specific resources from recommendation listings in the Cost Optimizer section, ensuring better alignment with application and business priorities.
  • Pre-emptive Exclusion Rules: Configure exclusion rules to prevent unwanted recommendations in advance.
  • Time-Bound Rejection: Set a timeframe for dismissed recommendations, allowing them to reappear if they become relevant later.
• These enhancements provide greater control, flexibility, and efficiency in cost optimization, reducing manual effort while enabling more informed decision-making.

SecOps

Webhook Integration with Policy Schedule

• User has ability to configure webhooks through API as part of policy schedule creation. This helps configured webhooks to receive notification on completion of policy execution.

Compliance Standard

• Decommissioned CIS GCP 1.0 standard as there is latest standard (GCP 3.0) that is already available.

Platform

Enhancement: Tag Governance - New Columns in Resource View & File Download

• We have introduced two new columns in the Resource View and file downloads to improve tag management:
  • Missing Tag Keys
  • Invalid Tag Values

Note: These columns will be populated for all Tag Postures generated post-deployment. Users with existing tag postures will need to re-run the postures to populate these newly added columns.

Enhancement: OCI Resource Support in Inventory

• We have expanded OCI resource support in Inventory, adding visibility into key networking components. The following OCI resources are now included:
  • Virtual Cloud Networks
  • DHCP Options
  • Route Tables
  • Service Gateways
• This enhancement provides users with deeper insights into their OCI networking resources, improving cost analysis and resource tracking.

Enhancement: Policy Recommendation Exclusion

• Users can now create recommendation exclusion rules, allowing greater control over policy execution. These rules are evaluated during policy runs, and any recommendations meeting the exclusion criteria will be automatically marked as skipped, reducing manual effort, and improving efficiency.

Enhancement: Updated Policy Classifications

• We have refined policy classifications and sub-classifications for better clarity and alignment:
  • Access classification has been moved under Security, with Access as a sub-classification.
  • Optimization/Performance classification and sub-classification have been moved under Performance/Standards.
• These updates ensure a more structured approach to policy organization, making it easier for users to navigate and manage policies effectively.

Reports

Enhancement: AWS Backup Report

• This update enhances report scheduling flexibility and parameter clarity:
  • "Last Month" Parameter: Added a new "Last Month" option to simplify scheduling, eliminating the need for users to create a new schedule every month.
  • Dynamic Date Ranges: Introduced Last 7 Days and Last 14 Days as additional time range options.
  • Parameter Name Update: "Tag Key" has been renamed to "Resource Name" for better clarity.
  • Flexible Scheduling: Introduced "Not Selected" under Resource Name, allowing users to generate reports without specifying a resource.

Enhancement: AWS - Implement of Deduplication in FinOps Governance Assessment Report

• This update introduces Max Potential Savings in FinOps Governance Assessment Reports, aligning it with the Cost Recommendation Report.
  • Max Potential Savings will now be included in all summary sections of FinOps Governance Review Report and FinOps Governance Review Detail Report.
  • Potential Savings (without deduplication) will be displayed in detailed recommendation sections at the resource level.
  • This enhancement ensures consistent visibility into cost-saving opportunities across FinOps reports, improving financial analysis and decision-making.

Enhancement: AWS - Reservation recommendations to include look back period changes in report

• This update enhances Reservation Recommendations by incorporating multiple lookback periods (7 days, 30 days, and 60 days) in reports, aligning them with cloud provider options.
  • Previously, recommendations were based only on a 30-day lookback and shown in the Optimize Rate page and reports.
  • Now, reports will display recommendations for all applicable lookback periods, ensuring a more comprehensive view.
  • Potential savings calculations will continue using the 30-day lookback with No Upfront commitment, maintaining consistency in savings projections.
• This improvement provides better visibility and flexibility in analyzing reservation recommendations.

External APIs

• To see the external APIs which have been added, modified, and removed in this release, refer to: https://docs.corestack.io/v4.5/docs/external-apis-50-2501
• To see all the available external APIs, refer to: https://docs.corestack.io/reference/authtoken

Known Issues

Service Category Grouping in Dashboards

Backward compatibility for "Service Category" grouping in dashboards is not available in the 2501 release. The ability to categorize costs by Compute, Network, Storage, etc. will be supported in a future update.

AWS CUR Net Amortized Cost Inconsistency

There are inconsistencies with Net Amortized Cost fields in AWS CUR. When the expected fields are unavailable, the platform defaults to Amortized Cost. This issue is currently under review.

Recreating Saved Views and Schedules in Reports

Due to backend attribute changes introduced in release 2501, existing Saved Views and Schedules in reports may not function correctly. To restore functionality, users are required to recreate their Saved Views and Schedules.

Deprecated Items

Cost Posture and Widget Updates

Cost Posture Decommissioned

• The Cost Posture feature has been deprecated.
• Legacy Views Available: Users can still access Cost Posture (Legacy) - Account/Tenant View and Cost Posture (Legacy) - Admin View within the FinOps Dashboard.

Decommissioned Widgets & Alternatives

• Cloud Forecaster: Now replaced by the "Cost Trend" widget in the FinOps Dashboard.
• Cost of Resources by Tagged/Untagged: This functionality can be achieved in the "Cost Trend" widget using the Group by "Tag Status" option.