GreenOps
The GreenOps dashboard tracks the estimated carbon, energy, and water footprint of your cloud usage across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, built on the same reporting engine you already use for cost.
GreenOps is available in Preview. To enable it for your organization, contact your account manager.
What you see
-
Carbon this month: estimated carbon emissions (kgCO2e) for the current month per cloud provider, compared with the prior month.
-
Carbon intensity (kgCO2e/$): estimated carbon per dollar of cloud spend, trended over twelve months. Total emissions rise when your usage grows; intensity tells you whether you're getting cleaner or dirtier per unit of cloud you buy.
-
Carbon footprint trend, Carbon by cloud, Carbon by service, Carbon by region, and a 30-day daily trend.
-
Energy (kWh) and Water (litres) trends.
Carbon, energy, and water behave like any other metric in Cloud Analytics: open a widget as a full report, slice it by the dimensions you already use, or build your own reports — for example, carbon intensity grouped by region.
Methodology
GreenOps figures are estimates, computed from your billed usage with an open, published methodology. They are location-based and Scope-3-inclusive, and they are designed for tracking direction and finding hotspots — not for regulatory-grade accounting.
Each billing line item is matched to a rate that converts its usage quantity into energy, carbon, and water:
| Component | Approach | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Compute energy | Average watts per vCPU at 50% utilization, scaled by instance size and the time the unit covers | Cloud Carbon Footprint coefficients |
| Memory, storage, network energy | Published coefficients per GiB-hour resident, GB-hour stored, and GB transferred | Cloud Carbon Footprint coefficients |
| Data center overhead | Provider fleet-average power usage effectiveness (PUE) | Provider sustainability reports |
| Grid carbon intensity | Yearly average grid intensity (gCO2e/kWh) of the country hosting each cloud region | Ember open data (CC-BY) |
| Embodied (Scope 3) emissions | Server manufacturing emissions amortized over hardware lifetime, allocated per vCPU-hour | Cloud Carbon Footprint methodology |
| Water | Energy multiplied by the provider's fleet-average water usage effectiveness (WUE, litres/kWh) | Provider sustainability reports |
In short: energy = usage x per-unit coefficient x PUE, then
carbon = energy x grid intensity + embodied share, and
water = energy x WUE.
Line items whose usage unit cannot be classified are excluded from the estimates rather than guessed; coverage is typically above 95% of billed cost.
Why your numbers differ from AWS or Google Cloud tools
Your cloud provider's own carbon tooling (the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, Google Cloud Carbon Footprint) typically reports market-based emissions: they subtract the provider's renewable energy purchases, and they mostly cover Scopes 1 and 2. GreenOps reports the location-based figure — the actual grid intensity of the region where your workload runs — and includes an embodied (Scope 3) share.
This is a methodology difference, not an error: GreenOps figures read materially higher by design. Reporting frameworks such as the GHG Protocol treat market-based and location-based as two distinct figures, and many organizations report both. Use your provider's tool for the market-based number and GreenOps for the location-based view, engineering signal, and cross-cloud comparability.
Provider tools also lag one to three months; GreenOps updates daily, so a current-month comparison contrasts final data with partial data.
Limitations
- Figures are estimates built from family-level coefficients, not metered power. They are not audit-grade and carry no third-party verification.
- Rates are location-based: your provider's renewable energy purchases (RECs, PPAs) are not netted out.
- Grid intensity uses yearly country-level averages; hourly and zone-level variation is not yet reflected.
- Only matched AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure usage is covered.