FinOps Foundations · Module 02

Understand Usage and Cost

The Inform foundation: where cost data comes from and how the FOCUS specification normalises it, how tagging and accounts turn spend into owners, how to report it so people act, and how to catch cost anomalies before the invoice does.

Practice interactively →

What you will learn

• Name the main billing data sources and the key FOCUS cost columns
• Design a tagging and account strategy that allocates shared and untagged cost
• Build showback reports that answer the questions each persona actually asks
• Set up and triage cost anomaly detection

Lessons

1. Cost Data and the FOCUS Specification

   Detailed billing exports (AWS CUR 2.0 / Data Exports, Azure cost exports, GCP BigQuery billing export) are the raw material of FinOps; FOCUS gives them one common schema with columns such as BilledCost and EffectiveCost.

2. Tagging, Accounts and Cost Allocation

   Allocation assigns every cost to an owner using account hierarchy, tags or labels and rules for shared costs; a tagging policy, enforcement and reports on untagged spend keep it reliable.

3. Reporting and Showback

   Good FinOps reports are built per persona — trend and unit cost for leaders, budget versus actual for finance, daily service cost for engineers — and showback makes each team see its own spend without moving money.

4. Anomaly Management

   Cost anomalies are unexpected spend changes; managing them means detecting early with ML or threshold alerts, routing alerts to the owning team, investigating the root cause and closing the loop.