Despite its millions of rows of data, a typical cloud bill does a simple thing — it shows how much you spent last month on cloud. However, you need a specific set of metrics to answer meaningful questions about what it’s really costing to run cloud, and to understand what direction these costs are headed.
Since we last wrote about the importance of having a true cost metric for understanding AWS spend, we have seen the demand for these capabilities increase for all public clouds as FinOps practices mature industry wide. The cloud vendors — particularly Azure — have made this more straightforward by improving the granularity of their billing exports. In today’s multi-cloud world, Apptio is focused on providing you a single true cost metric and a range of metrics that can be used together to answer the varied questions of myriad stakeholders. In this post, we will review three types of cost metric that can help you answer most of these questions and explore how this is supported by the recent Cloudability launch of Cost List for Azure.