When observability meets FinOps: How we engineered 60% cloud cost reduction at New Relic

New Relic identified the challenge of managing cloud costs, which often become unpredictable and exceed budgets due to a lack of visibility and control. To address this, they leveraged their expertise in observability to create a FinOps practice, treating cost as an observable metric alongside performance and reliability. By correlating technical metrics with financial data, they achieved a 60% reduction in cloud production costs per gigabyte and sustained these savings over time. The shift involved integrating cost-efficiency into the development lifecycle, enabling real-time cost monitoring, and forecasting financial impacts before deployments. This approach led to the development of Cloud Cost Intelligence (CCI), a tool that automates the correlation of cost data with telemetry, giving teams the ability to make informed decisions about resource utilization and financial impacts. As a result, FinOps has evolved from mere financial reporting to a key component of intelligent engineering, aligning cost management with performance and reliability goals.