Optimize costs with FinOps hub

With the FinOps hub, you can monitor and communicate your current savings, explore new recommended opportunities to optimize costs, and plan your optimization goals. The FinOps hub dashboard presents all of your active savings and optimization opportunities in one dashboard. The FinOps hub automatically generates the dashboard based on historical usage metrics gathered by Cloud Billing and Recommender, including recent usage and current commitments.

The FinOps hub recommends opportunities to save by considering three optimization practices: turning off idle resources, right-sizing instances, and purchasing committed use discounts (CUDs). Metrics throughout the hub reflect how well you're using those optimizations and identify additional optimization opportunities to reduce costs and improve FinOps practices.

Permissions required to access the FinOps hub

You need the Billing Account Administrator or the Billing Account Viewer role to access the FinOps hub and view available recommendations, the FinOps Score and CUDs optimization metrics, and the metrics that inform cost optimization across projects associated with your billing account.

To view the recommendation detail panels, you will need project viewer access and recommender-specific permissions. Refer to the FinOps hub cost recommender table to see the recommenders that contribute to hub metrics. To learn how to grant permissions to view recommendation updates, visit Recommender overview.

To access the FinOps hub using a custom role, you need the following permissions:

• billing.accounts.get
• billing.accounts.getSpendingInformation
• recommender.costRecommendations.summarizeAll
• recommender.costRecommendations.listAll
• billing.finOpsBenchmarkInformation.get
• billing.finOpsHealthInformation.get

Explore the FinOps hub

To view the FinOps hub:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to your Cloud Billing account.

   Go to your Cloud Billing account

2. At the prompt, choose the Cloud Billing account for which you want to view the FinOps hub.

3. In the Cost optimization section of the billing navigation menu, select FinOps hub.

Understand the FinOps hub Dashboard

The FinOps hub dashboard summarizes your current cost optimizations and introduces Google Cloud-recommended optimizations. Information on the FinOps hub reflects historical data collected.

Optimization Summary

The Optimization Summary is a snapshot of how much you're currently saving with optimizations, current recommendations from Google Cloud, and how much more you could save by adopting additional optimizations. The Optimization Summary includes:

• Last month's realized savings - the total monthly savings related to CUDs, right-sizing instances, and removing idle resources.
  • Note that realized savings do not calculate savings from turning off idle resources. Additionally, you might see a negative total if you have underutilized CUDs.
• Active Recommendations - the total number of Google Cloud-recommended optimizations available to you. Recommendations include suggestions to turn off idle resources, right-size instances, and purchase CUDs.
• Potential Savings per Month - the total amount of money you can save by applying all available recommendations.

Note: The Optimization Summary metrics are calculated once per day, so there may be a discrepancy between the Optimization Summary and Top Recommendations metrics.

FinOps Score

The FinOps Score can help you gauge how well you're using Google Cloud tools to monitor and save costs as well as how you can continue to optimize costs. The score is a calculation based on how you follow optimization best practices, including the following:

• Monitoring spend by actively logging in and using Cloud Billing tools.
• Optimizing resources by turning off idle resources and right-sizing instances.
• Purchasing CUDs, including CUDs opportunities recommended by Google Cloud.
• Establishing automated practices such as enabling BigQuery Export and API adoption.

Select Improve your score to review Google Cloud recommended cost-saving actions based on three stages of the cloud FinOps journey: inform, operate, and optimize.

The FinOps score also provides a Peer Benchmark score as a view of your optimization performance in the context of industry verticals based on aggregated usage data. All customers are automatically opted into Peer Benchmarking aggregation, but you can choose to disable participation at any time. However, if you choose to opt out, you will no longer see CUD Recommendations, the FinOps Score, and the Peer Benchmark Score in the FinOps hub.

The FinOps and Peer Benchmark scores are based on data collected two days prior and are updated daily.

Disable or re-enable Peer Benchmark participation

To edit Peer Benchmarking participation, you must have the Administrator role and dataprocessing.groupcontrols.update permissions.

1. Sign in to Identity and Access Management (IAM).
2. Select Privacy & Security from the navigation menu.
3. In the Transparency & Control tab, select Billing Account and find your account in the dropdown menu
4. Select the "Billing" data processing group.
5. To opt out, select Disable.
6. To opt in, select Enable.

Note: When you disable permissions, you are opted out from Peer Benchmark participation, but the FinOps hub dashboard might take two to four business days to display enablement changes. If you disable participation, you might still see the Peer Benchmark metric for several days, and if you re-enable participation, it might take two to four days to view the Peer Benchmark metric again.

Top Recommendations

The Top recommendations widget shows you the top 10 recommendations by potential cost savings. Each recommendation displays the estimated monthly savings, the associated service, and a brief description of the recommendation.

Select the recommendation to retrieve further details and to apply the recommendation.

Note: You can only view recommendation details if you also have access to the Recommender Viewer role.

Potential Savings by Service

With Potential Savings by Service, you can focus on savings by service. The chart shows the total potential savings from all cost optimization opportunities broken down by the associated service.

You can gain further insight by selecting View details to review all the optimization opportunities for the selected service.

CUD optimization

The CUD optimization widget presents last month's savings as well as your rate of CUD optimization and your peers' optimization rate. We determine your CUD optimization rate by calculating how much of your usage across all products over the last 30 days can be converted to CUDs. For example, in the past 30 days, you might have spent $10,000 on Google Cloud products eligible for CUDs, and received $8,0000 worth of CUDs. In this example, you are using $8,000 out of $10,000 in CUDs opportunities, so your CUD Optimization rate is 80%.

The Peer Benchmark score is a metric calculated with aggregated data, similar to the FinOps Score Peer Benchmark, and offers an opportunity to consider how your organization is using CUDs compared to industry peers.

Apply recommendations

You can continue to optimize by taking advantage of Google's recommended cost-saving actions. You can access and apply recommended actions by reviewing Increase your score on the FinOps Score widget, clicking any of the recommendations on the Top Recommendations widget, or by visiting the Committed Use Discount Recommender.

FinOps hub cost recommenders

The FinOps hub dashboard receives metrics from various Google Cloud cost recommenders. Use the table below to learn more about each recommender.

Name	Recommender ID	Short Description
Cloud Run CPU allocation recommender	google.run.service.CostRecommender	Switch to CPU always-allocated
Cloud SQL idle instance recommender	google.cloudsql.instance.IdleRecommender	Remove unused SQL instances
Cloud SQL overprovisioned instance recommender	google.cloudsql.instance.OverprovisionedRecommender	Right-size overprovisioned SQL instances
Committed use discount recommender	google.compute.commitment.UsageCommitmentRecommender google.cloudbilling.commitment.SpendBasedCommitmentRecommender	Reduce costs through commitments
Idle custom image recommender	google.compute.image.IdleResourceRecommender	Remove unused images
Idle IP address recommender	google.compute.address.IdleResourceRecommender	Remove unused IPs
Idle persistent disk recommender	google.compute.disk.IdleResourceRecommender	Backup and remove unused disks
Idle VM recommender	google.compute.instance.IdleResourceRecommender	Remove unused VMs
Managed instance group machine type recommender	google.compute.instanceGroupManager.MachineTypeRecommender	Right-size MIG machine types
VM machine type recommender	google.compute.instance.MachineTypeRecommender	Right-size VM machine types
Unattended project recommender	google.resourcemanager.projectUtilization.Recommender	Reclaim or remove unused projects

Resources

• Google Cloud Architecture Framework: Cost optimization
• Optimize Costs with Committed Use Discounts
• Purchasing spend-based committed use discounts
• Purchasing resource-based committed use discounts