Why observability needs FinOps, and vice versa: the Vantage integration with Grafana Cloud

Ben Schaechter is co-founder & CEO of Vantage, a cloud cost management platform that provides actionable insights for every engineer.

Observability tools have changed the way we monitor infrastructure and applications, as teams get complete visibility into performance across complex, multi-cloud environments. 

But as all that infrastructure scales, costs rise with it, and organizations are left to ask: Where are my costs going—and why? In addition, configuration changes in one of your cloud environments can have adverse, unintended impacts on your overall observability costs.

At Vantage, we believe the first step to managing these costs is getting visibility on them before the bills come in each month. Being able to track and monitor each of your observability tools helps identify what is driving those costs and provides justification to other stakeholders for infrastructure-related decisions. Think of it as observability for observability—because understanding those costs is just as important as monitoring performance.

In this blog, I’ll describe the parallels between observability and FinOps and how they can work together. I’ll also introduce you to Vantage’s Grafana Cloud integration, which is designed for our mutual users that haven’t fully centralized on Grafana but still want to centralize their FinOps for more insights and better control of all their infrastructure and observability expenses.

Bringing FinOps to observability

FinOps, otherwise known as cloud financial operations, is the practice of cross-functional teams collaborating on cloud cost management to maximize value. Each team—whether it’s engineering, finance, or an operations team—works toward the same financial goals. 

Observability can also play an important role in the FinOps equation. When you break it down, it’s easy to see that many basic FinOps principles align closely with observability practices. Consider the following parallels:

• Collaboration between teams:

  • FinOps: Cross-functional teams, like engineering, finance, and operations, work together to monitor costs, identify cost overruns, and maintain budgets.
  • Observability: Engineering teams work together to ensure systems are consistently monitored, identify any bottlenecks, and maintain system reliability.

• Real-time data for decision-making:

  • FinOps: Engineering and finance teams use real-time cost and usage data to help with cloud-related decision-making vs. waiting for the bill to hit your bank account each month. 
  • Observability: Engineering teams use real-time system metrics to quickly identify and resolve performance issues and ensure optimal system health.

• Continuous improvement:

  • FinOps: Cost management is an ongoing iterative process, especially as your infrastructure scales.
  • Observability: With observability, you need to continuously optimize monitoring to improve system insights and reduce downtime.

Watch the metrics, but mind the costs

Organizations can also use these parallels to bring financial awareness to their observability strategies. Consider the example of a startup running applications on EC2 instances. The team has a mix of production and development environments, and they need visibility into CPU utilization, memory usage, and network traffic across their infrastructure. 

At first, the team enables monitoring across all instances, collecting data every minute; however, as their observability footprint grows, so does their bill. The team realizes that while this constant data collection provides them with important data, their costs also increase—especially as this pricing is tied to active metrics, instances, and users.

After reviewing the total cost impact of this practice, the team considers cost optimization strategies. They adjust their data collection intervals and refine which metrics matter for their insights. This way, the team does not pay for any unused features. When you combine FinOps with observability, engineering teams better understand infrastructure usage patterns, finance teams can stay on track with their quarterly budgets, and the entire organization can ensure that their monitoring costs sustainably scale. 

Observability meets cloud cost management

​​Observability is important for managing modern infrastructure—but it shouldn’t come at the expense of cost efficiency. That’s why we’re releasing an integration with Grafana Cloud that makes it easier for teams to bring FinOps principles to their observability practices. 

Grafana Cloud already has billing dashboards and a billed usage API that allows users to access this data directly to understand where your costs are going. But if you haven’t centralized all of your observability services onto one platform like Grafana Cloud, it can be difficult to manage and determine your TCO. By partnering with Vantage, Grafana users who manage multiple services can aggregate their spending data across all their services. 

By making use of Grafana’s billed usage API, Vantage ingests and visualizes costs associated with key usage metrics, such as:

• Number of active series for metrics
• Gigabytes of logs and traces
• Grafana and Grafana IRM users

Vantage has multiple cloud provider integrations, so instead of managing observability costs in isolation, teams can view their Grafana Cloud costs alongside their primary cloud provider’s costs (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). Vantage provides cost reporting capabilities, as well as anomaly detection, budget management, and the ability to create cost allocation segments and virtual tags—all of which are compatible with the Grafana Cloud integration. 

In addition to the major cloud providers, Vantage also integrates with many of the same external data sources as Grafana, so users can compare costs against tools they’re already monitoring and building dashboards for in Grafana, such as Datadog, MongoDB, and GitHub.

Getting started with the Vantage integration with Grafana Cloud

Ready to get started? Register for a free Vantage account and connect it to your Grafana Cloud account to today and start optimizing your observability spend. See the Vantage blog for more details, and see the Vantage documentation for instructions on how to connect your account and get started.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!