Why I'm Excited About Attribute
Exploring New Frontiers in FinOps
As many of you know, I’m obsessed with granular visibility and delivering business value when it comes to FinOps.
Being a techie at heart, I get as excited about new FinOps tools as a kid touching a new car for the first time. 😊
Honestly, though, the FinOps product scene can get boring. Everyone seems to be doing the same thing, following the same formula. That’s why it feels so refreshing when a new player brings some real differentiation to the table.
Today, I want to talk about one such standout: Attribute (www.attrb.io)
I have a habit of reaching out to the product owners of tools that pique my interest, and thanks to Shahaf Galili, VP of Product at Attribute (and now a friend), I had the pleasure of getting a deep dive into what Attribute is doing.
So, what exactly is Attribute?
A Fresh Approach to FinOps:
Attribute is a FinOps tool that focuses on automated and granular cost grouping by business metrics, all without the need for tagging.
Most tools out there still rely on tagging resources to understand cloud spend—tedious, manual, and prone to errors.
Attribute bypasses this by automatically grouping cloud costs based on business metrics.
They use unique data points, including their own Attribute Sensor (eBPF), to deliver a clear, context-rich view of every cloud expense.
This removes blind spots and the hassle of manual calculations.
Plus, their multi-layer cost analytics give both technical and business teams valuable insights, creating a single source of truth for value-driven decision-making.
Here’s how it works:
Analysis of Cloud billing + eBPF + Telemetry data maps connections within your application, identifying how resources interact, at what cost.
Using back-propagation, the tool accurately calculates costs at different levels—feature, customer, application, or workload—giving you unmatched clarity.
This Complete cost transparency helps businesses make value-based, strategic decisions.
Attribute offers multi-layer cost analytics that serves as a single source of truth for both technical and business teams—bridging the gap between technology investments and business outcomes.
Words from Shahaf Galili, VP of Product
“We believe that FinOps is based on obsolete technology today, limited by the information that is derived from the cloud providers. We are trying to solve real problems of 2024 with a 10 years old technology. We are missing data and perspective.
FinOps is focused on cost savings, and that’s ok, but there is way way more to that in the money that you are spending in the cloud. This money is a looking glass or a crystal ball of your organization. It represents, for many companies, the real value that your organization owns or delivers to your customers.
Due to limited data, we have been tagging the infrastructure, trying very hard to get a view of the business value through the infrastructure, but we are limited with shared resources, and lack of data.
So our take is - get the detailed data. Stop tagging the infra, look at the Business value in the cloud using better technology
Our sensor automatically maps the connections between resources that you own in the cloud. We can automatically understand your full workload cost, and from that understand the cost of a feature, and application or a team managing these workloads.
We can automatically give you the exact cost that you are paying for each new customer you get on the cloud (if you are a SaaS company) or give you exact show back and chargeback for shared resources.
This way, you can go beyond cost saving. You can see the direct cost of a specific business value in the cloud. For instance getting the accurate cost of a customer can help you understand your margins, it can help you understand what is driving the cost per customer up or down. You can negotiate better on renewals and find out your profitable client profiles.”
Why Do I Love Attribute?
For me, accurate data is everything.
You can't deliver true business value without precise insights.
Here’s what you’ll get:
Cost of service
Cost of a customer
Cost of an application
Cost of a feature
Cost of an API
This detailed breakdown lets enterprises align their cloud investments perfectly with business objectives—something most tools fail to do effectively.
Attribute is a great fit for on-premise environments too.
The telemetry and eBPF data can be used to deliver gold-standard business analytics—even without cloud billing data.
And for SaaS companies, Attribute helps refine pricing strategies by calculating exact costs per customer.
Understanding these metrics allows companies to adjust margins, optimize pricing, and increase profitability.
PS: This isn’t a paid review.
This is just my first impression of Attribute, and I thought of sharing it as a curious tech enthusiast.
Actual user feedback will determine how well the tool performs in the long run. If you're interested, connect with the Attribute team for more insights.
As always, feel free to reach out to brainstorm FinOps or cloud strategies.