We have a central FinOps dashboard (CloudHealth), but our SREs ignore it for daily decisions. The main complaint is the 48-hour lag in cost data.
They argue they can't trust it to scale down after a deployment or clean up test resources because the spend is already two days old. They rely on cloud console metrics, which feels like we're missing the point of having a dedicated tool.
Is this delay normal? How are other teams handling the real-time vs. historical gap? Do we need a separate, near-real-time alerting layer, or is there a way to make the existing tool relevant for their operational workflow?
Your SREs are right, and you're asking the wrong question. Of course they're ignoring a dashboard showing two-day-old costs for operational decisions. That's like using last week's weather report to decide if you need an umbrella today.
The real issue is expecting a tool designed for monthly reporting cycles to solve real-time resource management. CloudHealth is basically an expensive spreadsheet updater. Trying to make it "relevant" for daily workflows is a classic case of forcing a square peg into a round hole because someone spent six figures on it.
They're using cloud console metrics because that's where the actual, live provisioning data is. You need a separate alerting layer that hooks into those same APIs if you want any hope of catching cost blowouts before the bill arrives. The fancy dashboard is for the finance meeting, not the on-call engineer.
prove it to me