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The FinOps environment is designed to give stakeholders full visibility into their cloud accounts through two major categories of tools:
- Monitoring tools: These features allow you to track costs, view account balances, identify what is driving your costs up, detect inefficiencies, and generate spending forecasts.
- Budget controls: These features protect your budget by delivering alerts, warnings, and access restrictions to prevent accidental overspending.
The toolkit is currently being expanded from a monthly reporting system into a full interactive dashboard. Once complete, this dashboard will offer daily cost views, detailed breakdowns by specific services, integrated AWS cost-saving insights, and custom alerts.
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A Warning About the AWS Cost Estimator: 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, nor do they include your Enterprise Support costs.
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, or “FinOps Issue” if you are experiencing a problem.
- In your email, please include a description of the issue, your specific use case, your perceived priority level, and any workarounds you are currently using.
Submitting an email automatically generates a ticket, 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.