Build a FinOps Team Dashboard from the FinOps Preset
Start from the preset, keep the handful of widgets the weekly review actually uses, and make it the page everyone lands on.
A FinOps dashboard earns its place if the weekly cost review can run from it without opening five other pages. In ZopNight that means an organisation-shared dashboard built from the widget library, usually starting from the built-in FinOps preset. This walkthrough covers building it, making it the default and getting the permissions right.
Before you start
Creating, editing and deleting dashboards needs the dashboard create, update and delete permissions, which the built-in Editor and Admin roles carry. Viewers can open dashboards but not change them. Dashboards are organisation-wide in the current version: there are no personal dashboards, and there is one organisation default.
1. Look at the presets first
Open the dashboard switcher in the header. Four presets are always there: Executive, Engineering, FinOps and All Widgets. Presets cannot be edited or deleted; their Edit and Delete controls are disabled. Open FinOps and note which widgets you would keep.
2. Clone it
Clone the FinOps preset to create an editable copy, and give it a name your team will recognise, such as “FinOps weekly review”. Names must be unique in the organisation; a duplicate is rejected with a clear error.
3. Choose the widgets
Add widgets from the library drawer. A widget already on the dashboard is disabled in the drawer, so each appears once. For a cost review, the widgets that map to the usual agenda are:
| Agenda item | Widget |
|---|---|
| Where are we this month? | Stat cards, cost trend |
| Which clouds and services? | Cloud spend, cost reports |
| What costs the most? | Top costly resources |
| Are budgets holding? | Budget health |
| Who is spending it? | Showback |
| What can we save? | Recommendations, quick insights |
| Are schedules working? | Schedule activity, schedule success rate |
The cost trend widget also carries markers for detected cost anomalies, which is a natural starting point for the “what changed” part of the meeting.
4. Arrange and size them
Drag widgets to reorder. Each has a size of Wide (full row), Standard (half) or Compact (a third); there is no free-form resizing. Schedule activity and schedule success rate display side by side when placed next to each other.
The limits are generous but real: 50 dashboards per organisation and 50 widgets per dashboard.
5. Make it the organisation default
Set the dashboard as the organisation default. Everyone with dashboard access now lands on it at the dashboard home. If you later delete it, the default clears and people fall back to the All Widgets preset rather than an error.
6. Check what each viewer sees
Each widget is gated on the permission its data needs. A user without, say, report access sees a “no access” placeholder in that slot instead of the numbers, and the rest of the layout stays intact. Before the first review, open the dashboard as someone with the Viewer role, or ask one to screenshot it, to confirm the finance attendees see the budget and showback widgets.
If a single widget fails to load, it falls back to a placeholder without taking the page down, so a broken widget does not end the meeting.
Keep it honest
Dashboard changes are recorded in the audit log like any other change, so “who removed the budget widget” has an answer. When you want to go beyond the dashboard into a specific cost flow, the Sankey cost breakdown on Cost Reports is the drill-down; team-level attribution is covered in showback. Further reading: dashboard personalisation best practices.