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 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.

How potential savings are determined

The FinOps hub considers three optimization practices to create cost-saving recommendations: 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

To access the FinOps hub and view available recommendations, the FinOps score and CUDs optimization metrics, you need either the Billing Account Administrator or the Billing Account Viewer role for your Cloud Billing account.

To view the recommendation detail panels, you need the Project Viewer role for each of the projects that you want to see recommendations for, and recommender-specific permissions. See the list of FinOps hub cost recommenders for the recommenders that contribute to hub metrics. To learn how to grant permissions to view recommendation updates, see Recommender overview.

To access the FinOps hub using a custom role, you need the following permissions on your Cloud Billing account:

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

Explore the FinOps hub

To view the FinOps hub:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the FinOps hub.

   Go to FinOps hub

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

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 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: Realized savings don't calculate savings from turning off idle resources. Additionally, you might see a negative total if you've 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 estimated amount of money you can save by applying all available recommendations. If there are multiple potential opportunities to save on the same Compute Engine resources, such as a resource-based CUD and a flexible CUD, you get the recommendation with the highest savings.

FinOps score

The FinOps score can help you gauge how well you're using Google Cloud tools to monitor and save costs, and 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.
• Using tools such as tags and labels to allocate costs for your resources.
• Optimizing resources by turning off idle resources and right-sizing instances.
• Purchasing CUDs, including CUDs opportunities recommended by Google Cloud.
• Creating and monitoring budgets frequently.
• Automating your cost management by using tools such as the billing BigQuery export and using the Budgets API.

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 opt out at any time. If you choose to opt out, you no longer see CUD recommendations, the FinOps score, or 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. Your score might change depending on factors such as new customers joining the peer benchmark score.

Opt in or out of participating in the peer benchmark score

To opt in or out of participating in peer benchmarking, you must have the Billing Account Administrator role on your Cloud Billing account, and the dataprocessing.groupcontrols.update permission on your Cloud Billing account, which is part of the Data Processing Controls Resource Admin role.

1. In the Google Cloud console, open the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Transparency and Control Center for your Cloud Billing account.

   Go to Transparency and Control Center

2. Select your Cloud Billing account from the menu.

3. To opt out of participating in peer benchmarking, in the Data processing groups table, for the Billing group, click Disable.

   If you want to opt in, select Enable.

Note: When you disable permissions, you're opted out from peer benchmark participation, but you might still see the peer benchmark metric for several days. If you re-enable participation, it might take two to four days to view the peer benchmark metric again.

Potential savings/month

With the Potential savings/month chart, you can focus on savings by service or by project. The chart shows the total potential monthly savings from all cost optimization opportunities broken down by the associated service or project.

Select View all recommendations to review a list of all of your optimization opportunities.

Recommendations dashboard

To open the Recommendations dashboard, in the FinOps hub, from the Potential savings/month chart, click View all recommendations.

In the Recommendations dashboard, you can review all of the FinOps recommendations, view the recommendation details, send recommendations to others to review, and apply recommendations to optimize your cloud costs.

• When you first open the Recommendations dashboard, by default, the page shows all savings recommendations, for all services and projects, including Savings not specific to a project.
• You can use the Services and Projects dropdowns to focus the page on a smaller set of recommendations.
• The options available in the Services and Projects dropdowns are limited to the services and projects with active recommendations.
• If you select an individual service, or opt to view only some of the projects, the values in the summary (such as Last month's realized savings or Potential savings/month) and the recommendations in the list update based on the selections.
• The project option of Savings not specific to a project applies to costs and credits that are calculated at the billing account level, such as commitment fees.
• CUDs savings are calculated with costs and credits applied at both the billing account level and the project level. If you limit your recommendations view to Savings not specific to a project, you might see negative amounts in the savings summary. To view the most accurate CUD recommendations and realized CUD savings, select all projects.
• Use the optimization category tabs to focus your list of recommendations to a specific savings category, such as switching off idle resources, right-sizing instances, or purchasing additional CUDs.
• Use the Filter feature to select list properties to narrow your results.
• If you have the Recommender Viewer role on your Cloud Billing account, you can select a recommendation to get further details and to apply the recommendation. Depending on the type of recommendation, you might also need project permissions to view the details and apply a recommendation.

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.

If you have the Recommender Viewer role on your Cloud Billing account, you can select a recommendation to get further details and to apply the recommendation. Depending on the type of recommendation, you might also need project permissions to view the details and apply a recommendation.

Committed Use Discount (CUD) optimization

The Committed Use Discount (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 $8,000 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.

Last month's realized savings

For a high-level view of your savings from commitments, use the Last month's realized savings widget, which breaks down your savings by the services that you have purchased commitments for.

Carbon Footprint dashboard

Preview: This feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" of the Google Cloud Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

The Carbon Footprint dashboard presents the estimated greenhouse gas emissions from your Google Cloud usage, helping you optimize cloud spend while reducing carbon impact. For more information, visit the Carbon Footprint documentation.

When you view the Recommendations dashboard, in the list of recommendations, the Region column displays a green leaf next to locations that have the lowest carbon impact. For more information, see Low CO₂.

Apply recommendations

Continue to optimize costs by taking advantage of Google's cost-saving recommendations. To access and apply recommendations, take any of the following actions:

• On the FinOps score widget, click Improve your score to access and apply recommended actions.
• On the Potential savings/month widget, click View all recommendations to access the Recommendations list, then click any of the recommendations to view the details of the recommendation and take action.
• On the Top recommendations widget, click any of the recommendations to view the details of the recommendation and take action.
• On the Committed Use Discount (CUD) optimization widget, select View CUD analysis, and then select Recommendations to view the Purchase CUDs recommendations.

FinOps hub cost recommenders

The FinOps hub dashboard receives metrics from various Google Cloud cost recommenders. Use the following table 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
Idle reservations recommender	google.compute.IdleResourceRecommender	Remove unused reservations
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
Underutilized reservations recommender	google.compute.RightSizeResourceRecommender	Right-size underutilized reservations

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