Unlock cloud-cost management with Intelligent Observability and FinOps

Cloud costs are spiraling out of control. Why? Because organizations often lack real-time visibility into their cloud usage. Distributed teams operate in silos, spinning up resources on demand without a unified view of how those decisions impact the bottom line. The cloud’s dynamic nature makes it even harder to rein in sprawl, identify cost drivers, and detect anomalies—all critical for optimizing spend.

To succeed in today’s cloud-driven world, leadership must bridge the gap between engineering decisions and business outcomes. That means improving cloud-cost forecasting, making data-driven investment decisions, and ensuring cloud spending is aligned to business goals. 

FinOps brings ownership and accountability to cloud spend 

FinOps is a management practice that helps organizations control cloud costs. It’s a discipline that brings financial accountability to cloud spend by fostering collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. With FinOps, organizations align cloud costs with business objectives, ensuring peak performance at the right spend while driving business value.

The primary drivers for the adoption of FinOps across organizations are : 

• Need for cost visibility and accountability
• Culture of cost-consciousness
• Integration with workflows

Introducing cloud cost intelligence: Intelligent Observability in action

At New Relic Now+ in February 2025, we unveiled cloud cost intelligence (CCI)—now available in public preview. This powerful solution enables Intelligent Observability, allowing businesses to collect, analyze, and act on cloud cost data in real time. It’s fully integrated into our Intelligent Observability platform and collects all your cloud-cost data automatically, so you have anytime access to real-time costs.

Designed with FinOps best practices at its core, CCI promotes cross-team collaboration, cost visibility, and financial accountability—key to making informed decisions about cloud investments. With CCI, organizations can move beyond reactive cost cutting and start optimizing cloud spend strategically and forecasting accurately. New Relic can then become a single source of observability for cloud services and their associated costs across multi-cloud environments. By providing intelligent recommendations, we aim to help customers optimize cloud spending and reduce costs—all while maintaining exceptional customer experience.

Getting to know cloud cost intelligence

CCI is an observability tool for engineering, finance, and C-Suite teams to seamlessly connect application performance with spending insights. Integrated into the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform, it combines the richness of your application telemetry data with your cloud-usage reports to generate robust, in-context and real-time cost insights. With native New Relic Query Language (NRQL), alerting and notifications functionality, it brings together your telemetry and cost data into intelligent insights with real-time value.

It also expands visibility into Kubernetes costs and allocations by co-relating performance and cost insights. Through our Kubernetes visibility, feature teams can visualize granular cost drivers and application insights even on cluster and namespace levels.

Visualize your cost drivers

CCI seamlessly integrates with your cloud environment to provide precise visibility into your overall costs and trends. By utilizing tags at both the Infrastructure and New Relic levels, we can create views tailored to specific teams, applications, regions, and cloud components. This capability allows us to analyze critical metrics, including those from Kubernetes clusters.

Real-time cost visibility

After pinpointing the cost drivers, we can evaluate real-time cost events through a robust integration with New Relic's observability platform. This integration enables teams to link cloud expenditures with application performance metrics, facilitating the identification of cost drivers and opportunities for optimization. By leveraging telemetry data alongside historical cost patterns, we can offer hourly cost updates that reflect changes within 60 minutes of resource provisioning. Additionally, this connection to your billing data provides cost estimates based on the average unit price from the past week, complemented by New Relic telemetry data from the last 48 hours.

Intelligent anomaly detection

Once we identify the components that matter most for proactive alerting, we leverage our NRDB and NRQL services. These tools enable us to query and create alert mechanisms across almost all parameters of your cost data. Using NRQL, we can streamline the process of accessing detailed cost data, enabling us to define, allocate, and track spikes, trends, and time-series patterns. This allows for a clear evaluation of cost impacts across specific dates and time periods.

Cost in context 

By assigning costs to the appropriate applications and teams, we utilize cost intelligence in conjunction with the most popular APM and infrastructure services. This approach provides insights in the context of performance and uptime attributes of your applications and services. Additionally, with new team features and scorecards (currently in preview), you can assess cost expenditures, track cost allocation, and compare against industry-benchmarked FinOps practice scores.

With cloud cost intelligence customers gain: 

• Comprehensive visibility into cost drivers: gain detailed insights and understand the key factors driving cloud spend, enabling smarter decisions and strategic planning
• Linking costs to deployments and changes: track how deployments and environment changes impact costs, allowing for precise management of financial fluctuations
• Proactive alerts and notifications: stay ahead of budget issues with real-time alerts, helping you avoid overspending and maintain financial control
• Custom cost allocation: categorize cloud spending to easily manage and track budgets across departments or projects
• Kubernetes cost optimization and recommendations: receive tailored recommendations for optimizing Kubernetes usage, reducing unnecessary costs, and boosting efficiency
• Intuitive, customizable interface: access a user-friendly interface that can be personalized to streamline workflows and improve efficiency

The role of AI in shaping FinOps

The future of FinOps will be significantly shaped by advancements in artificial intelligence and enhanced intelligence tools. With the integration of New Relic AI algorithms, we can further tailor and optimize cloud resource allocation by dynamically adjusting to real-time usage patterns and business needs. AI will play a crucial role in conversational elements through predictive analytics, offering organizations more precise forecasts and cost-saving opportunities. The ultimate aim is to maintain peak performance while managing costs effectively, ensuring that resources are utilized efficiently.

Get started with cloud cost intelligence

Cloud Cost Intelligence (CCI) represents a shift toward data-driven cloud-cost management. By focusing on observability and real-time cost tracking, it allows organizations to make informed decisions based on key application performance and cost metrics. This approach helps technical and FinOps teams optimize resources, reduce unnecessary spend, and maintain strong performance, ensuring that cloud environments are both cost-effective and efficient. In a landscape where cloud expenses are often complex and difficult to manage, Cloud Cost Intelligence offers a clearer path to balancing cost with performance, supporting better financial management of cloud infrastructure.