Onam
3 · Optimise · Onam FinOpsCost explorer

Why did our cloud bill go up, and what moved?

Onam FinOps shows spend as a daily series and ranks what changed since the last period. You see billed and effective cost side by side, so the number matches the invoice and the reality.

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Illustration: daily cost bars beside a stack of coins and an ownership tag.
Illustrative
The problem

In your words

The bill went up and the board wants to know why. The provider console gives us a monthly total, which tells us spend rose but not where or when. Reserved purchases make one month look like a crisis and the next like a win. By the time someone has exported the data and built a pivot table, the meeting has happened.
What you see

What Cost explorer shows you

Described from the product documentation — what the view holds, not what we hope it will.

  • Daily cost series

    Spend by day, the level at which cost questions can actually be answered. Not just that spend rose — that it rose on a specific day.

  • Ranked movers

    Period-over-period movement along a dimension you choose, listed by contribution. A list of what changed, not a single percentage.

  • Billed and effective cost

    What the provider invoiced, and cost with commitments and amortised charges spread across the periods they cover. Both, side by side.

  • Four ways to cut it

    Cost by category, by owner, by resource and by day.

  • Balance checks

    Category totals are checked against the whole. If the parts do not add up, the console says so instead of dropping the remainder.

  • Partial data flagged

    A period that has not closed is labelled as partial, so an early-month comparison is not mistaken for a settled one.

How it works

The mechanism, step by step

What Cost explorer does, in the order it does it.

  1. 1
    Billing data is ingested

    A daily run keeps the current period up to date. A separate monthly-close run settles each completed period.

  2. 2
    Cost is decomposed

    Each period breaks down by category, owner, resource and day, with billed and effective cost reported for both.

  3. 3
    Movement is ranked

    The current period is compared with the previous one along your chosen dimension, and the movers are ranked by contribution.

  4. 4
    You check how settled it is

    Before you quote a figure, the Runs view shows whether the period has closed or is still moving.

Limits, said plainly

What it does not do

Knowing where a capability stops is part of deciding whether to buy it.

  • An open period is still moving

    Comparing a period that has not closed against a closed one compares partial data with complete data. The console flags it; read Runs before drawing a conclusion.

  • It explains cost, it does not change it

    Explore reads billing data. It does not touch anything in your cloud accounts.

FAQ

Questions about Cost explorer

Billed cost is what the provider invoiced in the period. Effective cost spreads commitments and amortised charges across the periods they actually cover. Billed cost reconciles to the invoice; effective cost shows what each period really consumed. Onam FinOps reports both.

Part of Onam FinOps

More in Onam FinOps

Back to Onam FinOps

Reconciled billing

Can we trust this month's cloud cost figure yet?

Explore Reconciled billing

Ownership & attribution

Who owns this cloud spend?

Explore Ownership & attribution

Forecast, budgets & anomalies

What will we spend, and are we going over budget?

Explore Forecast, budgets & anomalies

Onam FinOps

Cloud cost and commitment management on reconciled billing data — attribution, forecast, budgets, anomalies and savings.

The whole product
3 · Optimise · Onam FinOps

See Cost explorer on your own cloud.

Onam FinOps runs in the same console and login as the rest of Onam, with read-only access to your cloud.

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