LinkedIn Carousel: FinOps Audit Checklist

Post type: Checklist · 9 slides
Blog post: https://www.nuvikatech.com/blog/posts/finops-audit-checklist

SLIDE 1 — Cover

Headline: 5 questions every cloud team should be able to answer. Most can’t.

Sub-line: A practical FinOps audit checklist — SLA credits, billing anomalies, idle resources, reservation coverage, and cost allocation.

SLIDE 2

Label: QUESTION 1

Headline: Do you know which SLA incidents from the past 60 days are eligible for credit claims?

Body: AWS and Azure allow 60 days to file. GCP allows only 30. Most enterprises miss these windows not because the credits don’t exist — but because nobody has a job that is specifically “monitor SLAs and file claims.”

SLIDE 3

Label: QUESTION 2

Headline: How would you know if your cloud bill was 15% higher than it should be this month?

Body: If the honest answer is “someone would notice when the bill arrives” — that’s the gap. Billing errors, idle resources, and tag drift compound quietly. Detection should be daily and automated, not monthly and manual.

SLIDE 4

Label: QUESTION 3

Headline: What’s your Reserved Instance / Committed Use coverage — and where are the gaps?

Body: On-demand pricing is 30–60% more expensive than 1-year commitment pricing for the same compute. If your coverage is below 50% for workloads that have been running stably for 3+ months, that’s an active optimisation conversation.

SLIDE 5

Label: QUESTION 4

Headline: Which resources are idle — and do you have a defined process for terminating them?

Body: Orphaned EBS volumes, stopped EC2 instances still accruing charges, databases with no active connections — these accumulate because deprovisioning is nobody’s job. If the answer is “someone has to ask for it”, the friction is too high.

SLIDE 6

Label: QUESTION 5

Headline: Is your cost allocation accurate enough to make decisions with?

Body: Target: 85%+ of cloud spend tagged to a team, product, or cost centre. Most companies starting this exercise are at 40–60%. If engineers can’t see their team’s costs, they can’t optimise for them.

SLIDE 7

Label: THE BENCHMARK

Headline: Where do you stand? At-Risk / Acceptable / Strong.

Body: SLA credit claim rate: At-Risk <20%, Strong >90%. RI/CUD coverage: At-Risk <40%, Strong >80%. Idle resource rate: At-Risk >15% of spend, Strong <3%. Cost anomaly detection: At-Risk = manual/none, Strong = daily automated.

SLIDE 8

Label: THE REALITY

Headline: Most teams are in the At-Risk column on at least two of these. That’s normal. The goal is knowing where you stand.

Body: You can’t optimise what you haven’t measured. Running through these five questions once this quarter tells you exactly where to focus — and which category will return the most value per hour of effort.

SLIDE 9 — CTA

Headline: Want the detailed audit guide?

Body: The full checklist with specific things to look for in AWS, Azure, and GCP — plus the benchmark table for each category.

Link: nuvikatech.com/blog/posts/finops-audit-checklist