As cloud environments grow increasingly complex, managing and optimizing cloud costs has become a paramount challenge for organizations. Not only is the cloud a massive cost center, but to properly manage it as it scales, it’s important to be able to put those costs in the context of your larger business motions. Are your cloud costs rising proportionally to your other costs as your business grows? Are your infrastructure expenditures commensurate with increased revenue? 

Getting answers to these questions requires being able to view all of your relevant business data in a single place; not only your cloud costs, but also additional IT data like SaaS usage, private or hybrid cloud spend, production metrics, revenue, etc. In doing so, you can improve your maturing FinOps practice by more accurately forecasting and budgeting your cloud spend while also justifying cloud costs in support of your larger business goals.

This need for a sophisticated cloud cost management solution that can quantify the business value of cloud and general IT spend is widely recognized across industries. The FinOps Foundation has cited maturity for unit cost capability as one of the key areas where companies of all sizes struggle in their day-to-day operations. To grow in this area, cloud users need a wide range of data that they can ingest alongside their cloud billing data, without having to resort to the tedious and heavily manual process of exporting data from different providers and recreating it in yet another third party visualization tool.

Enter DataHub, a feature available to customers who are on a DoiT Cloud Navigator premium subscription, is designed to provide unparalleled visibility and control over not just cloud expenditures, but your wider business expenditures and usage data as well. By giving customers the ability to see any kind of business metric alongside their cloud analytics data, Cloud Navigator is now able to provide the necessary context to empower smarter financial decisions.

With cloud infrastructure spending consistently rising, tools like DataHub are essential for businesses looking to optimize their cloud investments and achieve financial clarity.

Introducing DataHub

DataHub is a game-changing feature within Cloud Navigator that allows businesses to ingest and analyze metric data from various sources in a single pane of glass. This capability enables users to generate detailed metrics for Unit Economics, providing insights into the total cost per business transaction.

Key Features and Benefits

1. Unified Analytics: DataHub aggregates cost and usage data from multiple sources, presenting it in a consolidated view. This holistic approach ensures that all relevant information is accessible in one place, facilitating better financial decision-making.
2. Unit Economics: A core feature of DataHub is its ability to calculate Unit Economics, crucial for businesses looking to understand the cost per unit of their products or services. By combining financial data with operational metrics such as units sold or user interactions, DataHub offers a comprehensive view of business performance, supporting informed decision-making and strategic planning.

Real-World Applications

DataHub is designed to cater to a variety of business needs, enhancing the value of the Cloud Navigator Premium tier. Some practical applications include:

• Financial Decision-Making: Track metrics that tie spending to business value and monitor Unit Economics to understand the cost of goods sold (COGS) per product or customer. Some customers want to analyze the margin for SKU sold, identifying variations across regions and products.
• Overall Cost Management: Use DataHub to report, allocate, control, and forecast costs. By sending data through DataHub, you can use all of the powerful capabilities present in Cloud Navigator on any data you want! Some of our customers use DataHub to forecast SaaS costs based on usage data, while others use it to receive alerts for anomalies in their third-party data warehouse spend.

At DoiT, we drink our own champagne by using DataHub to create unit economics for each user interaction within Cloud Navigator. To start, we’ve ingested data of the user interactions broken down by each engineering team/house within the organization (see the image below):

After ingesting this data, we then created a custom metric within the product called “User Interactions.” Then, using our regular cost data from all billing sources, we create a second metric cost “Cost per Interaction,” which is created by simply dividing the total cost with the new User Interactions metric. In the example below, we've also created an Attribution Group called "Everything" that encompasses all billing sources.

Using this new metric, we can now pull it into our Cloud Analytics reports to generate the total cost of our IT spend per each user interaction, making it much easier to determine how our own cloud spend is impacting our business KPIs, and to forecast our future spend as we continue to scale the business:

Why DataHub?

Understanding and implementing FinOps principles are crucial for maximizing the value derived from cloud investments. DataHub supports FinOps fundamentals by offering:

1. Comprehensive Visibility: FinOps emphasizes the importance of visibility into cloud costs. DataHub consolidates data from various sources, providing a single source of truth for financial and operational metrics.
2. Informed Decision-Making: With detailed insights into Unit Economics, you can make data-driven decisions that align spending with business value. This approach ensures that financial resources are utilized efficiently and effectively.
3. Cost Allocation and Optimization: By understanding the cost per unit of products or services, you can optimize pricing strategies, improve resource allocation, and enhance overall financial performance.

Conclusion

DataHub represents a significant advancement in cloud cost management, offering a comprehensive suite of tools to drive better financial outcomes and strategic decisions. By leveraging DataHub, you can gain deeper insights into your costs, optimize your cloud spending, and make more informed decisions about your business. As part of the Cloud Navigator Premium tier, DataHub is poised to become an indispensable asset for any organization committed to excellence in FinOps.

By leveraging the capabilities of DataHub, organizations can transform their approach to cloud cost management, ensuring they stay ahead in the competitive landscape. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements from DoiT, and continue your journey towards optimized cloud spending and financial efficiency.

For more information and to see DataHub in action, book a demo with a DoiT expert today!