What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Finout is centralized cloud cost governance, granular Kubernetes cost allocation down to pod and namespace level, and merging our AWS infrastructure cost with third-party SaaS spend like DataDog into a single pane of glass.
We operate a multi-tenant AWS EKS environment where microservices share underlying EC2 node groups. Before Finout, AWS Cost Explorer would give us a lump sum bill for our EC2 instance, making it impossible to know how much individual product teams or specific clients were costing. With Finout, we integrated our EKS metrics, allowing us to accurately attribute shared container cost by namespace. Even better, we mapped our DataDog logging cost directly to those same microservices inside Finout. They gave us an exact, unified cost per tenant without tedious manual spreadsheet math.
How has it helped my organization?
Finout has positively impacted our organization by fostering a true FinOps culture across our engineering teams. It removed the guesswork from cost attribution, automated our monthly financial reporting, and highlighted exactly where we were over-provisioning third-party tools.
We have achieved a twenty to thirty percent reduction in total cloud and SaaS waste by identifying orphan resources and optimizing underutilized third-party licenses. We also saved hours of engineering time previously spent manually building cost allocation spreadsheets every month.
What is most valuable?
The best features in my experience with Finout are the MegaBill, combining multiple cloud providers and SaaS tools into the consolidated dashboard. Virtual Tagging, Kubernetes cost allocation, cost anomaly detection, and custom dashboards are all valuable features.
Virtual Tagging paired with the MegaBill concept completely resolved our historic tagging gaps. If a legacy resource lacks physical AWS tags, we can virtually tag it in seconds inside Finout to fix our cost attribution immediately.
The governance capabilities of Finout are very solid. Virtual tagging rules allow us to enforce strict cost boundaries. From a security standpoint, it connects using secure, read-only IAM roles and digests AWS cost and usage reports, meaning it does not pose an operational risk to our live application environments.
What needs improvement?
While its visibility features are top-tier, I would appreciate seeing more actionable, automated remediations and guardrails similar to tools that can actively scale down infrastructure automatically. Rather than just alerting us to do it manually, I would also welcome deeper machine learning forecasting models for long-term budget.
More out-of-the-box native integration for mid-tier SaaS tooling would be a great addition to Finout's existing high-hitter integrations.
The platform is exceptionally strong for observability and reporting. Most desired improvements are centered on adding more active, automated infrastructure optimization features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Finout for more than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Finout is highly stable since it processes data asynchronously from our cloud billing reports. It has zero impact on our live production workloads.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Finout's scalability is excellent. It easily ingests massive, complex billing data streams and seamlessly handles the scale of our expanding EKS environments.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support team for Finout is responsive and highly technical. They were particularly helpful when we were setting up our initial EKS cost allocation rules.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before Finout, we relied entirely on native
AWS Cost Explorer, coupled with manual spreadsheet tracking and custom internal
Grafana dashboards.
How was the initial setup?
The initial onboarding and setup for Finout were quick because it relies primarily on API connections and cloud reports. The pricing is tied to your total monitoring cloud spend and is reasonable given the deep level of visibility and waste reduction it enables.
What about the implementation team?
We integrated it via read-only, cross-account
IAM roles for AWS alongside an open-source agent Prometheus connection to securely scrape our EKS cluster metrics.
What was our ROI?
The ROI for Finout was clear within the first sixty days when the anomaly detection and virtual tagging flagged several unmapped, ideal resources and overscoped SaaS commitments that we were able to clean up immediately.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated native AWS tools and a few legacy cloud cost platforms before choosing Finout. We selected Finout because it uniquely blends container metrics with third-party SaaS costs, whereas most alternatives only look at core cloud infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
I advise others looking into using Finout to take full advantage of the virtual tagging engine early on. Do not let imperfect physical infrastructure tags stall your FinOps journey. Use Finout's business mapping layers to organize your costs logically from day one.
If your team is struggling to piece together a clear financial picture across Kubernetes and external tools like DataDog, Finout is a fantastic choice. It bridges the communication gap between the DevOps team and finance effortlessly.
I give this product an overall rating of eight.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)