Logz.io Allocates 98% of Workload Spending, Cuts 30% from AWS Costs Using Finout

Israel-based Logz.io is a modern cloud observability solution that gives organizations an easy-to-use platform to view and manage the performance of their cloud applications and infrastructure. In addition to observability, the platform also provides advanced analytics to help identify issues faster.

Although FinOps is a key part of Logz.io’s business, its own capability was under pressure due to the fast growth of the company and its customers’ highly complex and varied technology estates. Logz.io turned to AWS Partner Finout to help improve its own FinOps capabilities. “We wanted to make it easy for our teams to see the impact of their decisions,” says Paz Shulman, FinOps lead at Logz.io. “Working with Finout made this easy—they respond so quickly and are so helpful.”

There were two key goals for the project. The first was to precisely allocate each spending dollar to a specific part of Logz.io’s business and product. The second goal was to ensure that teams throughout the company had easy access to the same information, enabling them to understand how their design and technology decisions affected the bottom line.

Finout’s Virtual Tags solution allows Logz.io’s FinOps team to tag any workload to a business unit, product feature, region, or anything it chooses. Virtual Tags work in near-real time and help the company more accurately attribute costs to specific parts of the business. In addition, tags can be changed as needs change. Logz.io was able to tag 98 percent of its AWS spending using these tags. The system has read-only access to Logz.io’s AWS systems and can also calculate spending on other cloud providers and bring them into one single dashboard. Finout uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for reliable, scalable infrastructure on demand, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service.

By creating dashboards for each business unit, the FinOps team was able to track AWS expenditure to individual parts of the business much more accurately. Additionally, their dashboards give Logz.io’s developers the power to see the financial impact of their code changes. These dashboards offer comprehensive insights, detailing not only the spend for each component, but also specifying which services are used and their associated costs for each business element.

This has enhanced the understanding of what was being spent and where, and has transformed business operations. Each of Logz.io’s 10 teams now benefit from a custom dashboard tailored to its needs. Creating the dashboards was simple because of Finout’s flexibility. “Building the dashboards is really easy,” says Shulman. “I just spent a few minutes with each team to include what they do and don’t need and that’s it.”

Previously, Paz was manually creating bi-weekly reports for the chief executive officer (CEO) which took 2–3 days to complete. “Now we can create far more detailed reports in minutes, or simply look at the dashboards,” says Paz. “But even better it means I can respond instantly to queries that people bring me.” Finout’s systems also provide alerts, so granular spending limits can be set and FinOps teams warned when predetermined spending limits are reached.

The data from these dashboards also helps to support better decision-making across the entire business. They display each step of the data journey within Logz.io systems, highlighting the costs incurred at every stage. Teams use these dashboards during testing phases to check that real-world application use matches forecast spending, making adjustments as needed. This enabled Logz.io to identify an unexpected increase in costs after a regional deployment of a minor feature change. By taking immediate action, it was able to reduce the cost impact of this change by 90 percent, before it was rolled out on a broader scale.

It also helps developers work more closely with business analysts using the same data and working towards the same goals. “It has really changed how the different parts of the business work together and deepened our understanding of each other’s roles,” says Paz. “It saves me days every week and means FinOps can react so much faster to what the business needs.”