Tracking FinOps KPIs has become a core part of cloud cost discipline, and the numbers show why. In the second quarter of 2025, global cloud infrastructure spend has grown to over $20 billion. That’s 25% more if we compare it to Q2 of 2024.
While it’s evident that cloud spending has skyrocketed, financial discipline hasn’t always kept pace.
Many enterprises are still blindsided by idle resources and zombie workloads silently eating away at budgets. Then there’s the ease of spinning up instances that may feel liberating for developers, but for IT leaders, it’s like playing whack-a-mole with a credit card.
This is where FinOps comes in as a necessity.
Organizations wanting accountability in their cloud operation can set FinOps KPIs and use the insights to stop wasting money on forgotten infrastructure.
Read this article for an overview of the top FinOps KPIs your organization can benefit from.
What are FinOps KPIs?
A company can have a FinOps strategy on paper, but if there’s no way to measure progress, it’s just words sitting in a document.
The organizations that actually get results are the ones benchmarking their efforts and tracking whether their cloud spending is turning into real business value.
As cloud usage keeps growing, and it always does, you need to know whether that usage is efficient or just money slipping through the cracks.
That’s where the FinOps Framework comes to the rescue. It helps different teams inside an organization take responsibility for the cloud services they use, rather than treating costs like some mystery charge that shows up at the end of the month.
And this entire framework heavily relies on FinOps KPIs, which give you hard numbers to figure out where money is going, whether it’s being spent wisely, and what needs to change.
Let’s explore what those cloud KPIs exactly are.
Types of FinOps KPIs and their applications (Top 25 KPIs discussed)
Before discussing the specific KPIs, it’s worth noting that these metrics are not just numbers on a dashboard for the finance team to worry about.
Instead, they connect the teams to communicate and collaborate, like Finance and Engineering, who don’t always speak the same language.
FinOps KPIs make it easier for each team to understand costs, usage, and efficiency in their own way. And still arrive at the same conclusion.
That being said, let’s get to know what the FinOps KPIs are.
Foundational KPIs
Some FinOps KPIs are considered foundational because they go beyond surface-level reporting.
Organizations tracking these cloud usage cost metrics and cloud performance metrics can identify inefficiencies early and take corrective action before costs spiral out of control.
Here are some of those important KPIs to keep on your radar:
- Total unpredicted variance of spend. This metric exposes how stable (or unstable) your cloud spending really is. It does so by calculating the unpredictable fluctuations in cloud costs over a set period.
- CSP cloud budget burn rate. This KPI tells you the speed at which you’re using up your cloud budget.
- High burn rate = risk of overspending, requiring optimization or additional approvals.
- Low burn rate = either cost efficiency or an underutilized budget.
- Ideal scenario = burn rate aligns closely with planned budget.
- Cost optimization index (COIN). COIN tells you how well resources are optimized and how much potential waste remains by comparing the savings opportunity to the total infrastructure cost.
- Hourly cost per CPU core. This KPI provides a baseline unit cost, which can be reduced by using reservations or switching to instance types that offer better price-to-performance ratios.
Cloud visibility KPIs
When cloud costs start showing up like charges on a credit card bill, it’s a sign that visibility is missing.
Cloud visibility KPIs consolidate spending data from all regions, services, and teams into a single view.
Below are the main cloud visibility KPIs (some with formulae) that help organizations identify inefficiencies and take action:
- Percentage of costs associated with untagged CSP cloud resources. This KPI tracks how much of your cloud spend is tied to resources that lack proper tags according to your organization’s tagging policy.
- Percentage of CSP cloud costs that are tagging policy compliant. This KPI measures how much of your cloud spend follows established tagging rules. A mature organization’s tagging criteria has better traceability and accountability.
- Forecast accuracy rate (Usage). By comparing forecasted cloud usage to actual consumption for specific services or categories, this KPI measures how reliable your usage predictions are.
- Forecast accuracy rate (Spend). This metric shows how well your spend projections align with actual cloud costs over a set period.
- Forecast drift rate. This KPI tracks how much your cost projections vary between planning cycles.
- Cost performance indicator (CPI). Rather than a basic budget vs actual check, CPI measures how much value you’re getting for the money spent on cloud resources.
- If CPI > 1, the value exceeds the cost (great news).
- If CPI = 1, you’re exactly on track.
- If CPI < 1, the value is falling short of expectations.
- Cost visibility delay. This KPI tracks the time lag between when a cost occurs and when it becomes visible in reports.
Cloud optimization KPIs
Visibility KPIs tell you what’s happening. But cloud performance optimization KPIs make sure it’s happening efficiently.
These cloud metrics show whether your infrastructure is aligned with actual demand and whether you’re getting the most out of every dollar spent.
Below are some cloud optimization KPIs:
- Percent of unused resources. This KPI measures how much of your allocated cloud infrastructure is simply sitting idle in the form of unattached storage volumes, orphaned load balancers, unused network gateways, etc.
- Percentage resource utilization. This cloud metric evaluates how effectively compute, block storage, or object storage resources are being used relative to their allocated capacity.
- Effective savings rate percentage. Tracking this KPI shows you the actual return on investment. It shows the ROI from discounts like Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, or committed use discounts, using which you can understand whether these long-term pricing commitments are delivering the savings you expected.
- Percentage of commitment discount waste. To prevent the loss of cost saving, this metric calculates how much of your prepaid or reserved capacity goes unused. That way, you can identify overcommitment and rebalance future purchases to match real usage patterns.
- Auto-scaling efficiency rate. This KPI measures whether your auto-scaling policies are working as intended. For example, you’re provisioning resources when demand rises and removing them when it falls.
- Pipeline jobs waste. This metric calculates the portion of total job costs wasted on unsuccessful runs, whether they failed, errored out, or simply timed out.
- Power schedule adherence rate. This metric checks whether automated schedules for starting, stopping, or modifying virtual machines are being followed.
Hybrid cloud KPIs
Hybrid cloud KPIs are for companies running mixed infrastructure.
So they may not be as relevant for fully cloud-native businesses. Still, tracking these IT infrastructure KPIs is critical when you want a full picture of how resources, costs, and staffing are evolving during or after migration.
A few main cloud migration KPIs and IT infrastructure KPIs to evaluate include:
- Cost of on-premises hardware. This KPI calculates what you previously spent on servers, storage, and networking, so you can consider migration to the cloud if these costs are too high.
- Power and facilities. Beyond hardware, running on-premises infrastructure carries utility and real estate expenses e.g. electricity for equipment, fire safety measures, physical security, floor space rental, etc.
- Total migration cost savings. This KPI compares your existing infrastructure spend with the cost of running equivalent workloads on your cloud platform.
- Cost of training. This KPI captures the expenses tied to training staff on new technologies, which is an important but sometimes underestimated part of a hybrid migration strategy.
Business-value cloud KPIs
Are your cloud efforts actually delivering tangible results for the organization?
You can find this out using business-value FinOps KPIs that connect technical performance to business outcomes. Let’s take a look at some of them.
- Application latency. This KPI answers whether your cloud-hosted applications are outperforming the legacy on-premises systems replaced.
- Queries to customer support. If support tickets are piling up, that’s a sign something’s off in your customer experience. To avoid getting unnecessary support calls, well-designed website pages, especially FAQs sections, always work.
- Education. Education KPIs check whether you’re equipping the organization to adopt cloud-first thinking by assessing your literacy and awareness programs and their progress.
Monitoring FinOps metrics and their applications
When leaders ask “What are our cloud metrics telling us?”, you can only answer confidently if you’ve been consistently tracking and applying those KPIs.
Because cloud services are billed in complex usage-based ways, organizations need to regularly quantify both the value and the risks of their cloud investments.
A practical way to frame FinOps metrics is by grouping them into four core areas: accountability, business value, cost and usage optimization, and tools and enablement.
These pillars create a practical framework for monitoring metrics that can be applied consistently across different industries and cloud environments.
How to present KPIs to the board
When it’s time to present FinOps KPIs to senior leadership, there are a few things to consider:
- Use SMART KPIs. Make sure the KPIs you have defined are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).
- Align with business goals. Select KPIs that clearly map to business objectives (i.e. skip the technical KPIs you use within teams).
- Choose the right presentation format.
- Real-time dashboards
- Concise reports that summarize findings and flag areas needing action
- Executive summary
Let us point you in the right direction
When you set FinOps KPIs, you indirectly build financial accountability into every layer of your cloud strategy.
But only accurate and timely data can make those KPIs meaningful, and assembling that toolkit manually is far from simple.
That’s why leading enterprises choose Ternary. It’s a multi-cloud FinOps platform that automates data collection and provides a proactive environment for cloud cost management and optimization.
Align cloud spending with business value.
