FinOps Overview
The FinOps section turns infrastructure into money. It takes the same estate the rest of Visual One reports on, meaning on-prem storage arrays, VMware hosts and virtual machines, and cloud subscriptions, and applies one cost model across all of it: what each asset costs per day, who should be charged for it, where the budget is going, and what could be reclaimed. Cloud-only cost tools stop at the cloud bill. Visual One’s differentiation is that the on-prem and virtual estate carries the same cost structure as the cloud one.
Where FinOps fits in Visual One
FinOps sits in the main navigation between Storage and Executive Reports, alongside Hosts, Files, Virtual, Backup, Switches, Databases, Cloud, Security, and Kubernetes. Every report reads a point in time: the Collection Date picker in the global header controls which snapshot you are looking at. The cost inputs behind these numbers, meaning the per-device power, floor space, and personnel defaults, are configured under Settings, and the infrastructure being costed is whatever the collectors are polling.
The reports in this section
The FinOps context contains fourteen reports. Each has its own page in this documentation.
| Report | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Savings Report | What could we reclaim right now, broken out by context |
| Chargeback Report | Which business unit owns which cost, down to the individual resource |
| Amortization Report | What each asset is still worth, and when it depreciates out |
| All Tags Report | Every tag key and value in the environment, in one catalog |
| Cost YTD Report | What you have spent this year, by context or by tag, month over month |
| Cost Per Sector Report | Budget against actual for Storage, Virtual, and Cloud |
| Financial Administration Report | The full cost build for every physical asset: purchase, maintenance, power, floor space, personnel |
| Optimization Recommendations | Specific recommended actions, with estimated savings and adoption status |
| Tag Summary | Every resource carrying one tag value, with its daily cost |
| Tag Cost Inventory | Which tags spend the most, and how that is trending |
| Tag Forecasting | Where a tag’s cost is heading over the coming weeks and months |
| Tag Cost Modeling | What a proposed workload would cost before you build it |
| Cost Efficiency Dashboard | Which assets earn their cost and which do not |
| FOCUS Export | Your cost and usage data in the FinOps Foundation’s open interchange format |
Two ways to slice cost
Every report in this section groups cost one of two ways. By context, meaning Storage, Virtual, and Cloud, which answers what a layer of infrastructure is costing. Or by tag, meaning business unit, owner, environment, cost center, or application, which answers whose cost it is. Several reports let you switch between the two dimensions on the same screen, so the same spend can be read as an infrastructure number or an org-chart number without leaving the page.
How to use these reports
- The grid is the same everywhere. Every table in FinOps uses one component: a search box, saved views, row grouping by dragging column headers, an optional Pivot Mode, a Columns side panel for toggling fields and setting aggregations, and export controls. Learn it once and it transfers to every other report.
- Context switches drive the whole page. Tabs such as
Total,Storage,Compute, andCloudre-render every chart and grid at once rather than affecting a single panel. Tag Key and Tag Value selectors behave the same way. - Forecasts extend past today. Several trend charts plot points beyond the current Collection Date. Those are projections, drawn as a lighter continuation of the line, sitting alongside historical actuals in the same chart.
- Empty is not broken. Filtering to a combination with no matching data returns an empty grid and zero values rather than an error.
Tip: Columns you do not see are often still available. Open the Columns side panel before concluding a field is missing. Several reports carry scoring and aggregation fields that are hidden in the default view.
Who these reports serve
The FinOps Foundation defines six core personas. One platform and one cost model serve all of them, which is the reason the same numbers can go to an engineer and to an auditor without being rebuilt.
| Persona | What they come here for | Where they start |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering | Sizing a workload, reclaiming waste, right-sizing what is already running | Savings Report, Optimization Recommendations, Cost Efficiency Dashboard |
| Finance | Closing the books, chargeback and showback, budget variance | Chargeback Report, Cost Per Sector, Amortization Report |
| Procurement | Negotiating commitments and managing discounts | Optimization Recommendations |
| Product | Pricing a service against what it actually consumes | Financial Administration Report, Tag Summary |
| Leadership | Approving next year’s refresh, comparing one investment against another | Cost YTD, Cost Per Sector |
| FinOps practitioner | Connecting all of the above and running the practice | All Tags, Tag Cost Inventory |
Where the numbers come from
Three inputs sit behind every figure in this section, and knowing which one is wrong is usually how you resolve a number nobody trusts.
- Collection. Over 50 source types are supported, spanning storage arrays, hyper-converged platforms, hypervisors, backup software, object storage, network, and database, alongside Azure, AWS, and GCP. Collection is agentless and read-only, so nothing in the pipeline can change a production workload. Each source registers with its own schedule.
- Operating cost inputs. A storage array does not issue an invoice. Purchase price, maintenance, power, floor space, and personnel costs are configured per device under Settings, and those inputs are what produce a true cost per gigabyte per day for physical infrastructure. See the Financial Administration Report for how they combine.
- Asset records. Where ServiceNow is integrated, purchase price, contract terms, and lifecycle dates arrive from the IT asset management system of record rather than being entered by hand. These are precisely the fields a FinOps practitioner cannot produce alone.
Every screen is tied to a collection date, and the platform retains historical snapshots. Any report can be run against a prior point in time, which is what makes audit and period-over-period comparison possible rather than only current state.
The shared grid framework
The grid on these reports is the same component throughout the platform, so learning it once carries across every screen. It supports saved custom views, row groupings, configurable aggregations on effective cost values, pivot table output, and CSV export that preserves whatever grouping and filtering you applied. Charts carry zoom presets alongside explicit date pickers.
Cloud actual cost is less configurable than effective cost, because actual cost is what the provider reported and is not recalculated.
Security and data handling
- SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, audited in 2024 and 2025.
- Single sign-on with passwordless authentication.
- Collector credentials are least privilege and read-only.
- Encryption in transit and at rest, with credentials encrypted on first upload.
- Multi-tenant isolation throughout the application.
- Data retention is defined, with deletion within 90 days of account closure and an archive option before that.
Open standards
Visual One has adopted FOCUS version 1.3, the FinOps Foundation’s open cost and usage specification, ratified by the steering committee in December 2025. The FOCUS Export screen publishes the whole estate, including on-premise infrastructure that never produced a billing record, in that schema.