FinOps
Cost analysis, anomalies, waste, savings, and attribution — without writing a SQL query.
What FinOps in Escher covers
| Capability | Example question |
|---|---|
| Spend attribution | "What's our cost per team / product / environment this month?" |
| Anomaly detection | "Why did the bill spike?" / "Where are we burning money this week?" |
| Waste detection | "Find idle EC2, unattached disks, orphaned NAT gateways." |
| Commitment analysis | "Are our Savings Plans / RIs covering the right workloads?" |
| Forecasting | "Project this month's spend at current run rate." |
| Tag hygiene | "Which resources are missing required cost-allocation tags?" |
Sample answers
"What's driving our top 5 cost line items this month?"
Returns a ranked Canvas: each line item with the responsible team / service / project, the trend vs last month, and the largest contributing resources.
"Find $50K of recoverable waste in production."
Returns a list of optimization opportunities ranked by recoverable spend, with blast-radius assessment per item — so you know which are safe to act on immediately.
"What's the ROI of moving these workloads from on-demand to Savings Plans?"
Returns a coverage analysis with break-even point, risk of orphaned commitment, and projected savings.
What Escher needs to do FinOps well
- Cost data access (AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing)
- Resource metadata (the standard read-only permissions from your cloud connection)
- Tags — better tagging means better attribution. Escher will surface tag hygiene gaps in any FinOps Canvas.
Tips
TIP
Set your cost-allocation tags up front. Escher can attribute spend by any tag — but only if the tags exist. If they're missing, ask: "What tags should we add for better cost attribution?"
TIP
Anchor to a window. "This month" / "last week" / "since Mar 1" — anchored questions return faster, more direct Canvases.
What's next
- Cost Questions — Question patterns
- SecOps
- Pricing