The FinOps Foundation defines (Resource Utilization & Efficiency) as "In context to FinOps, resource utilization is about ensuring there is sufficient business value for the cloud costs associated with each class or type of resource being consumed. It is necessary to observe a resource’s utilization over time to understand if the performance, availability or other quality metrics are of value for the expense incurred.
For compute resources, there may be times when it is deemed that for performance or availability gains, average utilization may need to decrease and the extra expense incurred is worth the value creation the resource provides. Or the opposite may be true and performance expectations can be lowered to improve cost. For these decisions to be made, resource utilization, efficiency and cost must be looked at together."