Domain 1 · Understand Usage and Cost
A report for every persona, not one dashboard for all.
Reporting and Analytics is where the FinOps practice earns trust. CloudMonitor ships 30+ persona-aware Power BI reports — built for practitioner, engineering, finance, product, procurement, and leadership audiences — and lets you edit them in Power BI Desktop the same day a question comes in.
The problem
One dashboard, every audience, zero answers.
One dashboard for everyone.
Finance wants invoice totals, engineering wants resource detail, leadership wants trend — the same page can't serve all three.
Static portal exports.
CSVs from the portal age out by Tuesday and stay in someone's downloads folder forever.
No drill-through.
An anomaly at the invoice line never traces back to the resource that caused it. The conversation stops at "ask the engineer".
How CloudMonitor answers
30+ reports, one source of truth.
Persona-aware reports.
30+ Power BI reports across every audience: practitioner, engineering, finance, product, procurement, leadership. Each one starts with what that role needs to decide.
Edit in Power BI Desktop.
Open the .pbix, rewire the visuals, publish back. No SaaS lock-in, no waiting on a vendor roadmap to add a column.
Invoice to resource drill-through.
Click an invoice spike, land on the resource group, then the resource, then the meter. The conversation stays in one report.
Custom report builder.
The questions you didn't anticipate — built in the admin app, shared in Teams, scheduled to a mailbox. No ticket to the data team.
A report for every audience
The same data, framed for the person reading it.
Leadership
The one-screen executive summary.
Current-year cost against projection, the three-month trend, top services, and a security and governance read — the page a CFO or CTO opens before a board update, with no spreadsheet in between.
Practitioner
The daily driver.
Period cost, projected financial-year spend, potential savings, and the insights surfaced automatically down the side — the practitioner's home page for the morning cost check.
Finance
Spend by the structure finance recognizes.
Roll cost up to the cost groups that mirror your chart of accounts, see the month-by-month distribution, and trace the most expensive groups — the view that makes chargeback a conversation, not an argument.
A sampling of the 30+
More reports, one per question your teams actually ask.
Every report ships pre-built and editable in Power BI Desktop. These are the ones teams open most.
Outcomes
Reports leadership actually opens.
30+
Persona-aware Power BI reports
Editable
Open in Power BI Desktop
Drill
Invoice → resource group → resource
Related Capabilities
More in the Understand Usage and Cost Domain.
Allocation
Cost groups, virtual tags, and shared-cost splits without renaming a single Azure resource.
Anomaly Management
Daily detection at the resource level with Teams or ITSM alerts.
All Understand Usage and Cost Capabilities
See every Capability in this Domain side by side.
Source: this page interprets the Understand Usage and Cost domain published by the FinOps Foundation, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The wording, examples, and product mapping on this page are CloudMonitor’s own.
See the 30+ reports against a sample tenant.
The demo ships every persona report pre-loaded — open one, drill through, edit a visual.
