Why
A single dashboard cannot serve a CFO and an SRE. The CFO needs total spend trends and budget variance; the SRE needs per-service cost breakdowns and anomaly spikes. When different teams use different tools and see different numbers, trust erodes and cost conversations become debates about data accuracy rather than action. Role-based views ensure each persona sees actionable data at the right granularity from a single source of truth.
What
Build two core dashboards that serve progressive needs — first an executive Cloud Spend Overview (inform), then a Governance & Compliance Scorecard (influence). Start with stakeholder discovery to ensure you build what people actually need.
How
Run Stakeholder Discovery
Identify core persona groups and run 30-minute interviews with at least one representative per group. Ask three questions:
- What cloud cost question do you ask most often?
- Where do you currently go for the answer — and how painful is it?
- What would you do differently if you had that answer on demand?
Map answers to decision patterns — this tells you which dashboards to build and in what order.
Expected persona patterns:
| Persona | Core Question | Decision Behind It |
|---|---|---|
| Management | How much are we spending on cloud? | Budget approval, board reporting |
| CCoE / FinOps | Are cloud resources governed well? | Policy enforcement, compliance posture |
| Service Owner | How much is my application costing? | Architecture decisions, cost trade-offs |
| Engineer | How can I improve costs? Am I compliant? | Right-sizing, scheduling, tagging compliance |
Build Dashboard 1: Cloud Spend Overview
Purpose: Give every stakeholder a single place to answer “how much and where.”
Primary audience: Management first, then everyone.
Key widgets: Total spend (current month vs previous), spend by business unit / team, spend by service, spend by environment (prod vs non-prod), month-on-month trend, top 10 cost drivers.
Tooling per provider:
| Provider | Recommended Tool |
|---|---|
| AWS | QuickSight with CUR 2.0 / Athena (or AWS CID pre-built) |
| Azure | Power BI with Cost Management connector (or FinOps Toolkit) |
| GCP | Looker Studio with BigQuery billing export |
| Cross-cloud | Grafana with multi-source, or commercial FinOps platform |
AWS offers the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID) — pre-built QuickSight dashboards deployed via CloudFormation that read from CUR 2.0. These provide a production-grade starting point.
Build Dashboard 2: Governance & Compliance Scorecard
Purpose: Give CCoE and engineers a real-time view of whether the organisation is operating within its own rules.
Key widgets:
| Widget | What It Shows |
|---|---|
| Tag Coverage (spend-weighted) | % of total spend with all mandatory tags |
| Coverage by Mandatory Tag | Horizontal bar per tag key |
| Coverage by Team | Heatmap — creates team-level accountability |
| Policy Violations (active) | Count with severity breakdown |
| Non-Prod Scheduling Adherence | % resources scheduled, estimated waste |
| Commitment Coverage Rate | % eligible compute covered by RIs/SPs/CUDs |
Data sources: CUR/billing exports (tag coverage), cloud-native policy engines (violations), cloud advisor APIs (commitment coverage).
Deliverable Checklist
- Stakeholder discovery interviews completed (min. 4 personas)
- Decision patterns mapped to dashboard requirements
- Dashboard 1 (Cloud Spend Overview) live and accessible
- Dashboard 2 (Governance Scorecard) live and accessible
- Access permissions configured per persona group
- Data refresh confirmed (at least daily)