FinOps capabilities

The FinOps Framework includes capabilities that cover everything you need to perform FinOps tasks and manage a FinOps practice. Capabilities are organized into a set of related domains based on the goals of the capabilities. Each capability defines a functional area of activity and a set of tasks to support your FinOps practice.

Understand cloud usage and cost

The Understand cloud usage and cost domain is focused on data acquisition, reporting, analysis, and alerting on top of your cost, usage, and carbon consumption. This domain is all about observability and business intelligence. It brings the data that stakeholders need together (ingestion) into a meaningful breakdown for the organization (allocation). Then it can be reported on (reporting) and monitored to proactively identify and react to issues (anomalies).

• Data ingestion
• Allocation
• Reporting and analytics
• Anomaly management

Quantify business value

The Quantify business value domain is focused on identifying and breaking down cost, usage, and carbon emissions to establish and stay aligned with organizational plans and measure the return on investment from cloud computing efforts. This domain is all about measuring and maximizing the business value each team and workload gets from the cloud to maximize future potential.

• Planning and estimating
• Forecasting
• Budgeting
• Benchmarking
• Unit economics

Optimize cloud usage and cost

The Optimize cloud usage and cost domain is focused on designing and optimizing solutions for efficiency to ensure you get the most out of your cloud investments.

• Architecting for the cloud
• Workload optimization
• Rate optimization
• Licensing and SaaS
• Cloud sustainability

Manage the FinOps practice

The Manage the FinOps practice domain is focused on establishing a clear and consistent vision of FinOps and driving cultural adoption across your organization. Unlike other domains that focus on FinOps tasks to drive efficiency and maximize value, this domain emphasizes managing and supporting your FinOps practice.

• FinOps education and enablement
• FinOps practice operations
• Onboarding workloads
• Cloud policy and governance
• Invoicing and chargeback
• FinOps assessment
• FinOps tools and services
• Intersecting frameworks

Related content

Once you understand which capabilities are most critical, start your first or plan your next iteration:

• Conduct a FinOps iteration

Related products:

• Cost Management
• Azure Advisor
• Azure Carbon Optimization

Related solutions:

• FinOps toolkit Power BI reports
• FinOps hubs