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Synthetic example

Sample FinOps Decision Pack

This fictional example shows how a diagnostic connects cost evidence to an owner, a decision and an action. All figures, accounts and outcomes are illustrative.

Executive decision

ExampleCo’s synthetic monthly Azure spend moves from CAD 42,000 to CAD 49,500. The CAD 7,500 change is explained by a CAD 4,800 workload volume increase, CAD 1,900 in new observability ingestion and CAD 800 in rate and mix effects. The example asks leadership to approve ownership and measurement before changing production capacity.

Illustrative only: these figures do not describe a client, a benchmark or expected savings.

Example action register

1. Attribute observability spend

Owner: platform lead. Evidence: ingestion growth and missing service tags. Validate schema and retention before any change. Risk: losing incident visibility.

2. Review idle development capacity

Owner: engineering lead. Evidence: low utilization in non-production hours. Test shutdown rules and exception handling first. Risk: disrupting test windows.

3. Revisit commitments later

Owner: finance and platform. Baseline is too uncertain today. Wait for workload forecast and stable usage before a purchase decision.

Example 30/60/90-day sequence

  1. 30 days: assign owners, reconcile billing categories and agree the observability baseline.
  2. 60 days: test one low-risk non-production schedule and measure reliability and cost effects.
  3. 90 days: decide whether to expand the rule and whether commitments are justified by stable usage.

The full working format also includes evidence references, confidence levels, effort estimates and a decision log. Discuss your own decision boundary.