Science Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) provides the systems, processes, and analytics needed necessary for NASA projects to monitor their cloud usage, manage budgets, ensure spending discipline, and make informed financial decisions about their cloud accounts.
The FinOps environment includes is designed to give stakeholders full visibility into their cloud accounts through two major tool categories of tools:
- Observation‑based tools: Provide cost tracking,
- These features allow you to track costs, view account balances, cost‑driver analysis, inefficiency detection, optimization recommendations, and
- analyze what is driving your costs, detect inefficiencies, and generate spending forecasts.
- Controls‑based tools: Deliver
- These features protect your budget by delivering alerts, warnings, and access restrictions , and safeguards
- to prevent budget
- accidental overruns.
The toolkit is currently being expanded toward from a monthly reporting system into a full interactive dashboard offering . Once complete, this dashboard will offer daily cost views, fine‑grained service‑level breakdowns by specific services, integrated AWS optimization insights, and user‑customizable alerts and cost controls.
Monthly Financial Reports
Reporting and Cost Estimation
Currently, Principal Investigators receive individualized monthly financial reports issued one month in arrears, including . These reports detail your obligated funds, detailed specific service usage, remaining balances, and accurate cost estimates for the just‑completed month.
A Warning About the AWS Cost Estimator
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: While you can view your estimated pricing in native cloud dashboards like AWS Cost Explorer provides only estimated pricing. It does not reflect NASA’s enterprise discounts or Enterprise Support costs, and should not be used , you should not use this as a source of true cost accuracy.
Reporting & Support Procedures
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Native AWS dashboards do not reflect NASA’s enterprise discounts, nor do they include your Enterprise Support costs.
How to Get Support or Request Features
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The FinOps toolkit is continuously evolving, and we encourage user feedback. To request a new feature or report an issue, please email
support@sciencecloud.nasa.gov.
- Use the subject line “FinOps Feature” if you have an idea for a new capability requests
- , or “FinOps Issue” for problems
- if you are experiencing a problem. Include
- In your email, please include a description of the issue, your specific use case, your perceived priority level, and any workaround
- workarounds you are currently using.
Submitting an email automatically generates a ticket
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, ensuring centralized communication with our development team. Additionally, if you need to download financial data in a specific report format not currently available in the toolkit, you can request custom formats through this same support email.