Question 1

During a monthly FinOps review, the team notices sudden spikes in compute costs. Upon investigation, they find malformed usage entries in the dataset. Which of the following best aligns with FOCUS data quality assurance practices to proactively prevent such issues?

Options :

A : Wait for the cloud provider to fix the data before continuing analysis

B : Suppress anomalous values from reporting dashboards

C : Implement schema validation rules during data ingestion

D : Configure dashboards to ignore sudden cost changes under 10%

Answer: C

Question 2

During a FinOps maturity review, an organization identifies inconsistent metadata usage as a barrier to effective cost attribution. The FinOps team proposes implementing the FOCUS schema. Which FinOps Framework domain does this action primarily support, and why?

Options :

A : Inform – because FOCUS enables consistent metadata and tagging to improve cost allocation and decision-making.

B : Operate – because FOCUS defines how to build automation scripts for cost optimization.

C : Optimize – because FOCUS includes prescriptive discounts and resource rightsizing strategies.

D : Procure – because FOCUS manages vendor negotiations and billing consolidation.

Answer: A

Question 3

A FOCUS Analyst prepares a report showing an unexpected 25% increase in storage costs across multiple business units. Which of the following is the most appropriate way to present these findings to both finance and engineering stakeholders?

Options :

A : Share raw UsageRecord data exports with all stakeholders for transparency

B : Present a summary of the CostRecords grouped by service and include potential usage drivers with supporting AllocationRecords

C : Provide only the overall cost delta and suggest teams investigate on their own

D : Create a heatmap of regional storage SKUs without contextual explanation

Answer: B

Question 4

After analyzing a normalized FOCUS dataset, an analyst notices that a product team consistently has higher storage costs per GiB-hour than other teams. All teams use the same cloud provider and similar storage classes. What is the most data-driven next step to validate the cause?

Options :

A : Recommend the product team move to a cheaper provider without further analysis

B : Assume the team has inefficient storage practices and escalate to finance leadership

C : Compare only total monthly storage costs across teams to simplify the insight

D : Review resource-level metadata for differences in data access patterns or retention policies

Answer: D

Question 5

A Business Unit Lead asks a FinOps Analyst to project their team’s cloud expenses for the next quarter using FOCUS-aligned data. Which approach best utilizes the FOCUS data model to support this forecasting scenario?

Options :

A : Apply estimated cloud growth rates provided by vendors to monthly invoices

B : Average compute utilization metrics from monitoring tools and apply to future budget

C : Use historical cost data from the lineItem/unblendedCost field, grouped by billingPeriod/startDate

D : Estimate based on employee headcount and service-level agreements

Answer: C