FinOps Report Service#

The FinOps Report Service powers the conversational report designer in FinOps → Reports. It creates reusable report designs that can be saved, scheduled, redesigned, and refreshed with current FinOps data on every delivery.

This is different from the one-off HTML report generated from the CMP Agent chat. Use the FinOps Report Service when you want a recurring email report for stakeholders.

What It Does#

The service helps you move from a plain-language request to a scheduled report:

  1. You describe the report you need

  2. The service gathers the relevant FinOps, Discovery, recommendation, and connection data

  3. It builds a live HTML preview with summaries, KPIs, tables, and charts

  4. It checks that the preview uses real data and can be safely sent by email

  5. The saved design is reused and refreshed each time the report runs

The saved report design does not lock in the values from the preview. Dates, costs, tables, and charts are refreshed for the selected Data Window on every scheduled run.

Designing a Report#

Start from FinOps → Reports → New Report and describe the outcome you want. For example:

  • “Create a monthly executive cost report with total spend, trend, and top savings actions”

  • “Show budget status by allocation group and highlight groups at risk”

  • “Build a provider breakdown with reservation costs and top recommendations”

The preview is generated from your tenant data and can be refined in the same conversation. You can ask for layout, tone, audience, sections, charts, and emphasis to change before saving the report.

Redesigning Existing Reports#

When you redesign an existing report, the service starts from the saved design instead of creating a new report from scratch. This lets you make incremental changes such as:

  • Add a reservation cost section

  • Move recommendations after the executive summary

  • Change a chart from provider breakdown to allocation group breakdown

  • Rewrite the narrative for a finance audience

  • Refresh the layout while keeping the same report content

If the change needs new data, the service collects it. If the change is only visual or editorial, the existing design can be updated without changing the report structure.

Data Available#

Reports can include the same FinOps and cloud-management context available in Reply CMP, subject to your permissions.

Area

Examples

Costs

Total spend, spend by connection, service, resource type, allocation group, or provider

Trends

Daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly changes, comparisons, and cost movement

Budgets

Budget amount, current spend, forecast, and groups at risk

Allocation

Group hierarchy, ownership, unallocated resources, and multi-assigned resources

Recommendations

Provider advisory items, cost-saving actions, confidence, and estimated impact

Reservations

Reservation and commitment costs, expiry context, and coverage indicators

Connections

Provider, connection inventory, and refresh history

Discovery

Resource counts, tags, support level, lifecycle, category, and inventory samples

Governance

Allocation quality, discovery freshness, and cost refresh signals

The service tries to include both a snapshot and a trend where that makes the report more useful. For example, a provider cost section may include today’s breakdown and a trend chart for the same providers.

Scheduled Delivery#

When saving the design, you choose:

  • Name: the report name shown in FinOps

  • Data Window: the period of data included in each report

  • Schedule: when the email is generated and sent

  • Recipients: the email addresses that should receive it

The Data Window and the Schedule are independent. A monthly report can be sent every Monday for review, and a weekly report can be sent only once per month if that fits your process.

Quality and Safety#

Before a report design is saved, the service checks that it is suitable for scheduled email delivery.

It verifies that:

  • The report contains real tenant data, not placeholder values

  • Required sections, tables, and charts can be refreshed on future runs

  • The email can render in common email clients such as Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail

  • Unsafe web content is removed

  • Long technical identifiers, sensitive-looking strings, and raw prompt text are not exposed in the delivered report

If a generated preview does not pass these checks, the service retries before showing the final result.

Follow-Up Suggestions#

After a design turn, the service may suggest useful next refinements, such as:

  • “Add reservation costs section”

  • “Show provider breakdown as a doughnut chart”

  • “Add top resources by service type”

Suggestions focus on report content and layout. Scheduling, recipients, and the Data Window are managed from the report configuration screen.

FinOps Report vs CMP Agent Report#

Capability

FinOps Report Service

CMP Agent on-demand report

Location

FinOps → Reports

CMP Agent chat

Output

Reusable scheduled email report

One-off downloadable HTML attachment

Data focus

FinOps, allocation, recommendations, Discovery, and connection context

Any area the CMP Agent can answer from

Charts

Designed for email delivery

Designed for browser download

Scheduling

Yes, through report configuration

No

Redesign

Yes, from the saved report design

No

Best for

Recurring stakeholder reporting

Ad-hoc analysis and one-off sharing