Building a Multi-Account FinOps Dashboard on AWS with CloudThinker

Unify cost visibility, detect anomalies, and drive actionable optimization across multi-region AWS environments.

Executive Summary

Enterprises operating across multiple AWS accounts face a shared challenge: fragmented visibility.
Without a unified dashboard, finance, operations, and engineering teams work from disconnected data sources — each seeing only part of the cost picture.

CloudThinker, a SaaS-based FinOps platform built on AWS, centralizes this complexity. By integrating directly with Cost Explorer, AWS Config, CloudWatch, and the Cost and Usage Report (CUR), CloudThinker delivers a single FinOps dashboard that merges cost analytics, tag compliance, and anomaly detection into a real-time, AI-driven experience.

Business Challenge

Managing cost efficiency at scale isn’t just about reports — it’s about governance.
Organizations face four recurring issues:

1. •

   Incomplete visibility: Account and region silos fragment billing insights.

2. •

   Inefficient resource usage: Orphaned EBS volumes and idle RDS instances waste spend.

3. •

   Delayed detection: Cost anomalies surface too late for proactive action.

4. •

   Reactive planning: Lack of forecasting limits long-term savings strategy.

These issues inflate operational costs and obscure accountability between technical owners and business units.

Solution Overview

CloudThinker consolidates AWS cost, tagging, and performance data through a single FinOps control plane.

Key Capabilities

• •

  Tag Compliance Monitoring: Cross-checks resource metadata with Config and Organization tag policies.

• •

  Orphaned Resource Identification: Detects unlinked EBS volumes, Elastic IPs, and inactive load balancers.

• •

  Cost Anomaly Detection: Uses Bedrock AI to flag abnormal spend patterns across services and accounts.

• •

  Multi-Region Spend Comparison: Highlights the cost and utilization balance across regions.

• •

  Forecasting & Right-Sizing: Predicts spend trends and identifies EC2 or RDS savings opportunities.

These insights create a continuous FinOps loop — collect → analyze → visualize → optimize → act.

Architecture Overview

Each customer’s AWS accounts grant CloudThinker read-only cross-account IAM access.
Data from CUR (S3), Cost Explorer APIs, and CloudWatch metrics flows through an API Gateway into the CloudThinker processing layer, which applies normalization, tagging validation, and AI analysis via Amazon Bedrock.

Example prompt:

Outputs are visualized through the CloudThinker FinOps Dashboard, as shown below.

Figure 1 — CloudThinker AWS Cost & Usage Dashboard

Dashboard Insights

The following results illustrate how CloudThinker aggregates FinOps intelligence across AWS accounts.

Key Metrics

• •

  Total Monthly Cost: $47,832 (↑ 8.2 % vs last month)

• •

  Potential Savings: $8,450 / month (≈ 17.7 % optimization opportunity)

• •

  Untagged Resources: 127 resources requiring tag compliance

• •

  Orphaned Resources: 34 unused resources detected

Dashboard Components

Cost Visualizations

• •

  6-month cost trend from $38.4 K → $47.8 K

• •

  Service breakdown: EC2 ($18.4 K), RDS ($9.2 K), S3 ($6.9 K)

• •

  Multi-region spend: us-east-1 dominates 59 % of total cost

Optimization Opportunities

• •

  Right-Sizing: 5 EC2 instances identified ($874 / month potential)

• •

  Orphaned Resources: $313 / month waste (EBS, Elastic IPs, load balancers)

• •

  Tag Compliance: 127 resources across EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, EBS

Cost Anomalies

• •

  Sep 15: Data-transfer spike (+127 %, $1,247) → under investigation

• •

  Sep 12: Lambda surge (+89 %, $892) → resolved

• •

  Sep 08: New m5.8xlarge instance ($1,451) → approved

Recommended Actions

1. •

   Address data-transfer anomaly (Sep 15) → potential misconfiguration.

2. •

   Implement tag policy for 127 untagged resources.

3. •

   Apply right-sizing changes for $874 monthly savings.

4. •

   Remove orphaned resources to save $313 / month.

Total Monthly Savings Potential: ≈ $8,450 (17.7 %)

Feature Deep Dive

1. Tag Compliance & Orphaned Resources

CloudThinker correlates AWS Config data with tagging policies to enforce cost allocation standards.
It flags resources without Owner, Environment, or CostCenter tags, improving visibility for chargeback reporting.
Unused EBS volumes and detached Elastic IPs are automatically surfaced as candidates for cleanup.

2. Cost Anomaly Detection

Leveraging Bedrock’s foundation models, CloudThinker builds baselines from historical CUR data and detects deviations.
Spending surges trigger contextual alerts—complete with impacted resource IDs and probable causes—reducing detection time from days → minutes.

3. Multi-Region Spend Comparison

Cross-region analytics reveal skewed cost concentration.
In this example, us-east-1 accounts for 59 % of total spend; workloads can be redistributed or covered with regional Savings Plans to optimize price efficiency.

4. Forecasting & Right-Sizing

CloudThinker combines CloudWatch utilization metrics with regression forecasting to model next-month spend.
The AI engine recommends resizing EC2/RDS instances, purchasing savings plans, and scheduling idle shutdowns—all quantified with projected ROI.

Measured Business Impact

These results translate into faster governance cycles, consistent tagging compliance, and meaningful cost recovery across environments.

Best Practices

1. •

   Centralize tag governance through AWS Organizations & Config.

2. •

   Automate CUR data collection with scheduled ingestion.

3. •

   Integrate alerts with Slack or ServiceNow for faster remediation.

4. •

   Define FinOps KPIs: tag accuracy, anomaly response time, forecast precision.

5. •

   Review monthly → adjust right-sizing and forecast thresholds seasonally.

Conclusion

FinOps excellence depends on continuous automation.
CloudThinker’s AWS-integrated architecture empowers teams to see where money goes, predict where it’s heading, and act before inefficiency compounds.

By connecting Bedrock AI with AWS cost and telemetry data, CloudThinker transforms FinOps from reporting to real-time decision-making—aligning finance and engineering in a single operational rhythm.

Visibility is power; automation turns it into impact.