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
- Monitoring tools: Provide cost tracking,
- These features allow you to track costs, view account balances, cost‑driver analysis, inefficiency detection, optimization recommendations, and
- identify what is driving your costs up, detect inefficiencies, and generate spending forecasts. Controls‑based tools
- Budget controls: Deliver
- These features protect your budget by delivering alerts, warnings, and access restrictions , and safeguards
- to prevent budget overruns
- accidental overspending.
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 detailed breakdowns by specific services, integrated AWS optimization cost-saving insights, and user‑customizable custom 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 after the billing cycle ends. 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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AWS Cost Explorer provides only estimated pricing. It does : While you can view your estimated pricing in native cloud dashboards like AWS Cost Explorer, you should not use this as a source of true cost accuracy. Native AWS dashboards do not reflect NASA’s enterprise discounts or , nor do they include your Enterprise Support costs, and should not be used as a source of true cost accuracy.
Reporting & Support Procedures
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Who Can Access the FinOps Toolkit?
To protect sensitive financial data while ensuring transparency for researchers, the toolkit operates on a strict permission model controlled entirely by the Principal Investigator.
- Principal Investigators (PIs): PIs have full administrative access to all toolkit functions, financial data, and permission controls for their accounts.
- Team Members: PIs can grant specific team members access to view overall account usage, costs, and budget balances.
- End Users (Researchers): For cloud accounts that support individual scientists using resources, PIs can grant them limited access. This allows researchers to monitor their individual usage against their allocated budgets so they can avoid hitting resource limits.
How to Get Support or Request Features
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.