A few weeks ago, during a customer meeting, I was asked about the best way to create personalized reports for controlling costs in their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenant. Fortunately, OCI offers several built-in tools to help users monitor, analyze, and manage cloud spending. Among these are OCI Cost Analysis and Scheduled Reports, which provide valuable insights into usage patterns and trending costs over time. These tools are great for high-level reporting and everyday cost tracking, especially when you need to stay on budget or quickly spot any cost anomalies.
The Value of Detailed Cost Analysis
To ensure I provided the most comprehensive answer, I consulted with my colleague Erika Sciunzi, one of our experts in observability services. Our conversation sparked a lot of ideas! Drawing from her years of experience, Erika explained that for more in-depth analysis, such as breaking down spending across departments, correlating costs with specific resource tags, or building custom dashboards the access to raw cost and usage data is essential. This is where the ability to export and analyze detailed cost reports becomes particularly powerful.
An Open Source Solution for Multicloud Cost Visibility
To help address this need, Erika developed an open source project, available on GitHub so everyone can benefit. The solution leverages OCI Log Analytics and is both easy to implement and cost-effective. Because this solution is based on FOCUS reports, it can also aggregate data from multiple tenants, including both OCI public and OCI sovereign tenants. In fact, since FOCUS is an open standard adopted by all major cloud providers, it’s even possible to import consumption data from other hyperscalers such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
The Power of FOCUS-Compliant Cost Reports
It’s worth noting that OCI is fully compliant with the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) standard. The FOCUS report provides a standardized, comprehensive dataset that includes detailed information on costs, services, compartments, tags, and more. This makes it much easier to integrate OCI cost data with third-party tools or advanced analytics platforms. Read more at Announcing FOCUS support for OCI cost reports to make multicloud FinOps easier | cloud-infrastructure
A Customer Success Story
When we presented this approach to our customer, he was enthusiastic—it addressed exactly what he had been looking for. Impressively, he had everything up and running within a couple of days. (By the way, the customer is a project manager, not a developer, though he does have solid IT skills and a lot of enthusiasm.)
Hear It Directly from the Protagonists: Live at SOUG Day
The solution is now fully operational, with further enhancements underway. Erika and our customer will be presenting the true story project at the next SOUG Day in Bern SOUG Day Bern – 11. März 2026 – SOUG. If you’re interested, don’t miss the session, or feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to start a discussion!