FOCUS Reporting Terminology

B

Base Currency is a designated currency used for displaying consolidated costs. Conversion to base currency is performed using an exchange rate, updated daily from a public source. All FOCUS costs, including historical, are converted at the current rates, and so rates may differ from those used in original cloud vendor invoicing.

C

Category is a general reporting concept. Categories and categorization typically refer to the assignment of values to data using columns and tags, which can then be used for grouping and filtering data.

Cloud Tags come from tagging in your cloud environments, e.g. per environment, cost code, owner, etc. Cloud tags are made available to the reporting via the native FOCUS tags column. Selected tags that you or Certero have identified as useful will be available in the reporting via Virtual Tags (vtags) as a means of filtering and grouping data.

E

Effective Ravings Rate (ESR) measures the efficiency of commitment-based discounts such as Reserved Instances & Savings Plans. ESR is the percentage you've saved off on-demand equivalent (ODE) spend. In this reporting we use FOCUS contracted cost as the ODE.

F

Filters & filtering are general reporting terms that refer to controlling the scope of data in the report, for example only showing data for certain subaccounts, or only data with a specific set of tags. Filtering can be on a single condition or across multiple conditions.

FOCUS is a powerful, unified format for cloud billing data, explained here on the FinOps Org website: FOCUS - The Unifying Language for Technology Value. FOCUS data in this reporting is v1.0.

G

Grouping is a general reporting term that refers to bundling data based on categories. A single group can be displayed, for example, as a colored section of a chart column or a single row in a table. Grouping on FOCUS subaccount, for example, will automatically show a group for each subaccount. When grouping FOCUS data, there typically will be multiple rows of underlying data, and so numerical values will need to be aggregated, typically summed, to be able to be displayed as a single figure for the group.

P

Perspectives are FOCUS columns or vtag keys. When selecting a Perspective, the table rows and chart categories will be grouped based on the possible values of the selected Perspective. Additionally, if a report page has a Perspective Filter, the filter will be populated with the possible values for the selected Perspective which you can use, along with other filters, to scope the report.

T

Tags are key:value pairs assigned to resources, data, etc. The best way to think about tags is to consider the tag key as a column and the values are all the possible values that are assigned to that field across the rows of data.

V

Virtual Tags (vtags) are virtual tags assigned to cost data, based on agreed rules, and provide a powerful means of categorising, filtering and grouping data without depending on infrastructure teams correctly managing cloud tags. Vtags are configured for you by Certero based on agreed requirements or on interesting cloud tags which have been identified in your FOCUS data.