If you’ve recently migrated your data from one major cloud provider to another, you may have already noticed one of our top stories from last month. If not, we’ve got good news, so keep reading! And there’s even better news if you’re the type to get excited over the chance to learn more about FinOps and hone your craft.

Grafana Cloud offers organizations an end-to-end observability platform, without the overhead of building and maintaining their own observability stack. We’re constantly shipping new Grafana Cloud features to ensure users get the most out of the fully managed platform, which is powered by our open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics).

Did you know that companies typically waste as much as 35% of their budgets on unused compute resources? And, oftentimes, these idle resources are commitment waste — reserved commitments purchased at a discount but with the financial lock-in of one or three years. Commitments, such as Azure Compute Reservations (VM RIs), offer significant savings when compared to on-demand.

Azure provides a wide array of services, each with its own pricing model. Conducting detailed cost analysis helps organizations understand where their money is being spent within Azure. It allows them to identify areas of overspending or underutilization and optimize their resources accordingly. By analysing costs, organizations can identify unused or underutilized resources and either scale them down or decommission them altogether.

Proper backups are universally acknowledged as essential, yet they grow increasingly tedious and prone to error as DevOps complexity escalates. While some managed database services offer automated backup solutions, the scope of your backup requirements is likely to expand as the business and products scale. There's a considerable chance you'll find yourself hosting your own databases or stateful services, a task that can seem daunting in its demand for precision and reliability.

Research firm, IDC, published a study in early February 2024 predicting that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers break even after just 10 months. Moreover, the study, The Business Value of Google Cloud IaaS, reported that after migrating to GCP, the participants were on track to achieve a 318% ROI in five years. Here’s the thing. Achieving these milestones requires a robust GCP cost monitoring and optimization plan.