Practical cost visibility tools (AWS Cost Explorer, Datadog and others)

Visibility is the first pillar of FinOps maturity — without actionable data, there is no governance or optimization. According to the FinOps Foundation, companies that reach “informed” maturity can reduce waste by up to 23% simply by improving their cost telemetry. Tools like AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, and Datadog Cloud Cost Monitoring have become essential for providing real-time transparency on consumption, budget, and anomalies.

AWS Cost Explorer allows you to visualize and filter costs by account, service, tag, region, and team, as well as forecast future spending based on historical patterns and seasonal consumption. Combined with AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection, it forms the foundation of a robust financial governance stack — automating alerts and avoiding billing surprises.

Azure Cost Management + Billing aggregates budget policies, executive dashboards, and direct integration with Power BI, enabling advanced financial reports and chargeback models by department.

In multicloud environments, third-party solutions like Datadog, CloudHealth (VMware), and Apptio Cloudability complement visibility with correlation between performance metrics and cost. For example, you can relate latency and spend in the same dashboard to assess whether a particular service is “too expensive” for the value it delivers. This correlation between cost and technical impact is the heart of modern FinOps.

Best practices highlighted by the FinOps Foundation include:

• Disciplined and standardized tagging (owner, environment, product, project).
• Predictive budget alerts based on machine learning.
• Weekly consumption reviews with the technical team.
• And, most importantly, educating engineers to read financial dashboards the way they read performance logs.

Cost visibility is what transforms FinOps into action. Without it, engineering teams operate in the dark, and architecture decisions become gambles. With intelligent dashboards and automated policies, cost becomes information, and information becomes competitive advantage.

Gain visibility and benefits at the same time: by consolidating your billing in the Cloud Business Program, your company accumulates points — at no extra cost — to invest in FinOps training and tools, such as Datadog and AWS courses.

Also connect to our Cloud Professional Community and share financial visibility best practices with industry experts.