About AlphaSense
AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, the company’s AI-based technology has helped professionals make smarter business decisions by delivering insights from an extensive array of public and private content. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people in offices around the world.
“For us, the most crucial aspect of Finout is its ability to seamlessly integrate with the entire FinOps framework, enabling comprehensive cost attribution across multiple teams, features, and environments.”
Oscar C. | Director of Engineering
AlphaSense’s FinOps challenge
During a period of rapid growth, AlphaSense expanded its suite of market intelligence tools catering to sophisticated clients, leading to significant hurdles in managing costs across a complex cloud infrastructure. Initially operating solely with AWS, AlphaSense, evolving in accordance with customer demands, quickly included GCP and Azure. They didn’t want to be locked into one single cloud provider, but also wanted to manage all cloud tenants through Kubernetes.
Using multiple tenants means complex cost allocation, but AphaSense’s situation was further complicated by their work processes in which teams share cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes clusters:
“Because we have large clusters shared across different parts of the organization, we can’t assume that all costs in a particular cluster can be attributed to one business unit or team, Finout solved that for us.”
Igor E. | Lead Cloud Platform Engineer
AlphaSense needed to continue using the three main cloud providers alongside Kubernetes, therefore they wanted a universal solution that could provide clear insights into cost allocation. Their motivation was less about cost optimization or cutting costs and more about understanding where costs were being incurred and mapping them to business units and features
Why Finout?
An initial trial of native cost-allocation tools like AWS Cost Explorer and Kubecost proved cumbersome. Using each tool separately failed to deliver the desired outcome as the team manually calculated and consolidated costs per feature from disparate sources. Moreover, competitor tools such as KubeCost turned out to have unreasonable pricing models.
Finout however, could integrate with Kubernetes easily while providing a holistic view of costs across all providers.
“We didn’t want to have to deal with one tool for Kubernetes, one for AWS, one for Azure, etc. We appreciated Finout’s capacity to consolidate cost management and the ability to drill down into each feature’s costs across different providers.”
Igor E. | Lead Cloud Platform Engineer
The results of onboarding Finout’s cloud observability platform
AlphaSense chose Finout to get a better handle on their cost allocations, but they got much more than they bargained for. In addition to enhanced cost allocation visibility, Finout also helped them identify instances of unnecessary spending and streamlined workflows, resulting in valuable time and resource savings.
Cost allocation visibility
Despite the complexity of AlphaSense’s shared resources and infrastructure, Finout provides clear transparency and visibility into cost allocation. Regardless of which cloud provider is used, Finout makes it easy to identify the exact costs incurred by any business unit as well as the costs involved in the creation of every feature.
The Virtual Tagging feature is what makes this possible, and the adoption of Finout has encouraged the company to create a standardized tagging policy. While they are using Virtual Tagging to track their cost allocation, they are also able to measure their own progress in properly tagging resources.
“Virtual Tagging enabled us to track cost allocation effectively, incentivizing us to establish a streamlined tagging policy. Once fully implemented, we will unlock the full potential of the Virtual Tags.”
Igor E. | Lead Cloud Platform Engineer
Cost savings
While initially focused on cost allocation rather than cost optimization or savings, the AlphaSense team was pleasantly surprised by Finout’s CostGuard feature. By automatically identifying unnecessary spending on unused resources, the company was able to save $100,000.
“CostGuard makes it very easy to see the resources that are being wasted and what can be eliminated to reduce spending.”
Igor E. | Lead Cloud Platform Engineer
CostGuard is just one of several cost optimization features that AlphaSense plans to continue using in the future as it develops its FinOps strategy.
Efficiency
The integration of Finout has empowered AlphaSense’s FinOps team to efficiently manage spending and provide critical insights to both developers and business managers. Customized dashboards have been developed so that the FinOps team can quickly answer questions about cloud costs and budgeting.
Certain development teams have begun to customize their own dashboards in Finout, saving them significant time and enabling them to have a better understanding of their own contributions to the company’s spending.
A diverse solution that adapts to growing needs
AlphaSense began its journey with Finout without a clear FinOps strategy in mind. What started as a way to gain visibility into cost allocation continues to grow and evolve into a strategic FinOps adoption plan supported by Finout.
The Finout team is always available to troubleshoot and respond to requests. For example, when AlphaSense wanted to continue using a particular data storage solution that Finout doesn’t automatically integrate with, Finout was able and willing to add the capability.
“It is the little things that matter, and we are very secure in the knowledge that the Finout team is there to support us. As new features are added, we are not left on our own to figure out how to use them.”
Igor E. | Lead Cloud Platform Engineer
