Comparing FinOps for Cloud and Spend Management

FinOps for Cloud is SoftwareOne's cloud management tool offering comprehensive insights into your cloud infrastructure.

If you have previously used SoftwareOne's Cloud Spend Management for managing your cloud expenses, this topic will help you understand the key differences between FinOps for Cloud and Cloud Spend Management.

Integration with cloud vendors

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Amazon Web Services

Supported

Supported (currently unavailable)

Google Cloud Platform

Supported

Not supported

Microsoft 365

Not supported

Supported

Microsoft Azure

Supported

Supported

Cost allocation

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Resource allocation

Allocate resources by name, ID, tags, data source, resource type, and region.

Allocate resources by tags or virtual tags.

Cost visualization

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Customizable dashboards

Not supported

Configuration of tiles to represent data.

Cost drill-down

Ability to filter data using categories (such as service, region, resource type, data source, owner, pool, and more) and periods (daily, weekly, or monthly). See Resources.

Ability to filter data using categories (such as platform type, provider, tenant, subscription, custom group, provider, resource name, tag, and more) and periods (half-year, monthly). See Reports.

Detailed reports

Not supported

Reports can be customized to focus on specific metrics or time periods. They can also be downloaded, emailed, or published to SFTP.

Consolidated consumption

Costs are displayed on a chart (bar or linear) with details placed in a table. See Resources.

Different chart types (such as bar, linear, area, horizontal bar, and pie) and tables (table, summary table) are used to display costs. See Reports.

Cost optimization

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

High level overview

Main data overview contains information like total possible monthly savings, check time log, savings with commitments and savings on storage.

Overview of savings breakdown by Strategy, Total Predicted Cost, and Total Predicted Savings for 1 or 3 years.

Recommendations filtering

Based on categories (such as Savings, Security, or Critical) and applicable cloud provider services.

Based on categories (such as Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, or Security) and applicable cloud provider services.

Recommendation options

Information with short description, assigned category, affected cloud providers, affected resources, potential savings (in total and per each resource), actions (download report, settings, exclude pools, pin) and settings (each recommendation has its own conditions that can be updated during every auto check).

Shows Cost Optimization Strategy with predicted savings in the chosen currency or as percentage. Also includes a description of the purpose of chosen change.

Legacy data

Access to Archived recommendations.

Access to Realised and Unrealised recommendations.

Tagging

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

New tags setup

Tagging policy must specify if tag is required, prohibited, or if there's a correlation.

Resources affected by the policy are chosen based on filters, such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, paid network traffic from/to.

Allows you to manage and create tags. You can also specify the rule, name, add a new tag, or group as a new tag.

You can also select an existing tag or create a new tag if it doesn't exist. Additionally, you can filter resources based on criteria, such as resource type, region, service, and more.

Additional options include 'With recommendations', 'With violated constraints', and 'Paid network traffic from/to'. Resources are displayed in a table containing columns, such as Resource Name, Data Source, Pool, Region, Service Name, Resource Type, Resource State, and Software Asset.

Virtual tags

Not supported

Supported

Uploading tags to cloud provider

Not supported

Manage tags in manual or automated Resource rules based on resource properties, option to write tags back to vendor.

Budgeting and forecasting

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Cloud budget manager

Tabular view when creating a new quota or budget policy is possible. Each policy allows you to review resources grouped by configured filters.

Configurable views to display Consumption and Utilization grouped by Custom Groups or Provider.

New budget setup

Budget policy must contain the type, such as resource quota, recurring budget, or expiring budget.

Resources affected by the policy are chosen based on filters, such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, tags, and paid network traffic from/to.

Allows you to set up a budget by specifying the parent group name, name, total amount in USD, start date, end date, and owner email address.

Resources affected by the budget are chosen based on filters such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, tags, paid network traffic from/to.

Chargeback

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Name

Chargebacks

Chargebacks

Not supported

Allows you to distribute cloud spend to the relevant business units and cost centers across your organization.

You can select the account for which you want to add chargebacks by specifying details such as date, amount, and reason, and add multiple chargebacks. The form includes a table listing of your existing chargebacks.

Anomaly detection and spike alerting

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

New anomaly detection setup

The anomaly detection policy must specify the type, such as Resource Count or Expenses.

Resources affected by the policy are chosen based on filters such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, tags, paid network traffic from/to.

Three types of cloud consumption alerts are supported, including Spike Alerts, Overage Alerts, or Reserved Instance Utilization.

Spike alerting identifies usage anomalies in Azure or AWS environments. Overage alerting notifies you if consumption exceeds defined values. Reserved Instance alerting monitors the utilization of reservation purchases.

Manage anomaly detection

List of all implemented policies with their names, visualization of the status, short description and applied filters.

List of implemented alerts with their names, type, visibility, last run, along with the most important columns to quickly grasp the context of the definition.

Anomaly detection details

Detailed information about the policy together with detailed history showing all historical violations.

The preview section is a graphical representation of the alert, highlighting the time at which it occurs. You can interact with this chart, which includes 'hover-over text' when viewing a vertical bar in the chart.

Governance and compliance

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Name

N/A

List of historical events

General list of events with simple filtering by All, Info, Warning, Error.

You can also check event details, such as exact date, object name, object type, and short description.

Not supported (Audit trail redirects to Marketplace)

Collaboration

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Roles and permissions

Supports four types of permissions, including Organization Manager, Manager, Engineer, and Member.

User management (Moved to Marketplace in v2)

Multi-organization approach

A user can be a part of different organizations and can switch between them using the Organization menu.

A user can be a part of different organizations with different role and can switch between them.

Document collaboration

Not supported

Store and share large files conveniently.

Notifications

Feature
FinOps for Cloud
Cloud Spend Management

Name

Alerting

Reporting

Supported

Supported

Alerts

Supported

Supported

Notification settings

The Organization Manager can change notification settings.

Notifications can be enabled or disabled from these modules: FinOps, Policy Alerts, Recommendations, System notifications, and Account management.

Supports individual notifications with an option to share the notifications with other users.

Notification service

Email

Portal only, email and/or SMS

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