Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. The UI of FinOps

Your reports and dashboards provide the user interface (UI) for FinOps to your organization. By looking at your reports as your UI, you can apply decades of research into effective UI design. You should be looking carefully at those reports as the product of a FinOps practice. As such, it’s the interface through which your users interact with the data. How you present FinOps data in reports influences the success of FinOps enablement in your organization. The FinOps product should be treated as a production workload: quality is important, clarity is important, and user experience (UX) is important. These lead to trust in the data, which enables decision making by teams and prevents time wasted defending the quality of the data.

It’s easy to make reports containing pretty graphs and tables of data, but it’s harder to tell a story to your users based on what they need to know and enable them to make decisions about what actions they need to take. This chapter covers some important concepts to help you build high-quality FinOps reports. We’ll use the word report for the rest of this chapter, but these concepts and suggestions apply equally to dashboards and business intelligence systems used to deliver FinOps data to your users.

Build Versus Buy Versus Native

When thinking about the reporting you’ll create as part of your FinOps practice, first consider the tooling and platforms you will need to do the job. As you learned in Chapter 5, the volume of data ...