OxygenIT Wins 2025 API Award for Best in API Observability
Discover how IT Carbon APIs help organizations move from reporting emissions to optimizing workloads, cutting costs, and reducing carbon footprint. Learn actionable strategies, KPIs, and real-world examples for implementing GreenOps in IT operations.
When companies first began tracking IT-related carbon emissions, the focus was almost entirely on reporting. Sustainability officers needed numbers for annual reports, regulators asked for disclosure, and customers wanted assurance that digital operations weren’t unchecked climate liabilities.
The problem is that most tools built for this purpose stop at reporting. They produce spreadsheets and dashboards that summarize emissions but leave IT teams wondering: what do we actually do with this information?
This gap is now being filled by a new generation of IT Carbon APIs. These APIs don’t just provide emissions data; they generate insights that IT leaders, DevOps engineers, and finance teams can use to reduce both carbon and costs. In other words, the conversation is shifting from compliance to action.
Recent research highlights the urgency: IT already accounts for around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure expected to double by 2030 if unchecked. Clearly, reporting alone won’t bend that curve; optimization must become a core part of IT strategy.
At its core, an IT Carbon API automates the collection and standardization of emissions data across IT infrastructures. It connects with cloud accounts, data centers, and even SaaS usage, translating raw consumption figures—like CPU hours, memory utilization, storage consumption, and network traffic—into carbon equivalents.
The real value, however, lies in turning data into actionable insight. By embedding emissions information directly into IT workflows, APIs enable teams to see where emissions originate, forecast future trends, and take steps to optimize them.
For example, cloud providers often provide raw consumption logs, but these need to be adjusted for regional grid carbon intensity, which varies hourly and by location. IT Carbon APIs handle this automatically, converting kilowatt-hour consumption into kilograms of CO₂ equivalent based on the actual energy mix powering each data center. This allows organizations to compare regions, providers, or workloads in terms of both carbon and cost.
Reporting tells you what happened in the past; optimization lets you influence what happens next. This shift is the foundation of GreenOps, the emerging discipline that integrates carbon awareness into every IT decision, much like FinOps did for cost management.
Most organizations move through three stages in their IT carbon journey:
Stage 1: Reporting
Initially, companies focus on gathering emissions data for compliance or stakeholder reporting. Carbon figures are often delivered quarterly or annually, giving a retrospective view of IT’s environmental impact. This stage is critical for baseline measurement but rarely drives operational change.
Stage 2: Monitoring
With APIs in place, reporting becomes continuous. IT teams can now track emissions in near real-time, alongside cost and performance metrics. Carbon moves from an abstract number buried in a PDF to a visible metric in dashboards, enabling timely decisions. Monitoring enables alerting, anomaly detection, and more granular insight—down to individual workloads or VMs.
Stage 3: Optimization
The most significant shift occurs when APIs provide actionable insights. They highlight inefficiencies, suggest workload relocations, forecast the impact of scaling new projects, and even simulate scenarios. Optimization transforms carbon from a fixed outcome into a controllable variable.
This journey—from reporting to real-time optimization—mirrors the principles of GreenOps, which can be described as embedding carbon awareness into IT decisions at the same level as cost or performance considerations. GreenOps encourages IT teams to consider carbon alongside latency, uptime, and budget for every project, ensuring sustainability is baked into operational decisions.
Most companies today are somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2, but the competitive advantage lies in Stage 3, where carbon reduction is no longer passive but actively managed.
To understand the impact of IT Carbon APIs, it’s important to look at how they operate across diverse IT environments.
By making carbon a visible, actionable metric, IT Carbon APIs transform sustainability from a compliance task into a continuous improvement process.
The shift from reporting to optimization is already delivering measurable results across industries. For instance, a global software company found that moving non-latency-sensitive workloads from regions powered by coal-heavy grids to regions with abundant hydropower could cut emissions by as much as 40%, with only minimal cost impact. Scheduling high-performance compute tasks, such as AI model training or batch processing, around periods of high renewable energy availability can also significantly reduce carbon without delaying project delivery. APIs provide the data signals that make this alignment possible, giving teams real-time insight into where and when workloads should run.
Idle workloads are another common source of unnecessary emissions. APIs often reveal instances running continuously despite low utilization. Right-sizing or shutting down these underused resources can reduce both emissions and expenses by up to 30%. In more advanced scenarios, APIs can help optimize container orchestration and serverless functions by identifying over-provisioned workloads and scaling dynamically based on demand. Machine learning models integrated with carbon APIs even enable predictive placement of new workloads, suggesting the most carbon-efficient data center or cloud region while balancing latency and cost. Together, these insights turn carbon data from a passive reporting tool into an active driver of efficiency and innovation.
Operationalizing carbon optimization requires measurable KPIs that are integrated into daily IT operations. Metrics such as carbon per transaction allow teams to track emissions relative to business output, while carbon per compute hour provides a way to measure efficiency improvements over time. Tracking the percentage reduction per workload helps quantify the impact of optimization measures, and monitoring idle resource percentages highlights areas where energy—and money—is being wasted. Comparing forecasted versus actual emissions provides insight into the accuracy of predictive models and informs future planning decisions. By incorporating these KPIs into dashboards alongside cost and performance data, organizations can continuously monitor operations, quickly detect inefficiencies, and make data-driven decisions to optimize both sustainability and financial performance.
The benefits of carbon optimization extend far beyond environmental responsibility. Reducing idle workloads, right-sizing instances, relocating workloads to greener regions, and scheduling compute jobs during periods of low-carbon energy all contribute to lower operating expenses. According to the whitepaper, organizations that adopt GreenOps practices often see cost savings between 15 and 25 percent while also achieving measurable CO₂ reductions. Beyond the financial advantages, carbon optimization supports compliance and audit readiness. Regulators in Europe, the US, and other regions are tightening disclosure requirements, and APIs simplify the generation of standardized, auditable reports. Companies demonstrating proactive reduction strategies are better positioned during audits and can more confidently meet evolving reporting standards.
Reputation is another critical factor. Customers, investors, and partners increasingly reward companies that back their climate commitments with tangible action. Demonstrating that IT operations are actively optimized for sustainability signals accountability and forward-thinking leadership. In many cases, carbon efficiency and cost efficiency go hand-in-hand, transforming sustainability from a compliance checkbox into a strategic lever for operational and financial performance.
Successful API-driven optimization requires collaboration across multiple teams. DevOps teams use carbon metrics to inform workload scheduling, deployment strategies, and autoscaling policies. FinOps teams incorporate carbon alongside cost metrics to evaluate ROI and guide strategic investment decisions. Meanwhile, ESG teams gain access to granular IT data that was previously unavailable, enabling accurate reporting and informed sustainability planning.
A GreenOps workflow is continuous: APIs collect detailed usage and emissions data, dashboards display real-time carbon alongside cost and performance metrics, predictive models suggest optimization actions, and teams implement changes, feeding the results back into the system for ongoing improvement. This iterative approach ensures sustainability is fully integrated into IT decision-making rather than treated as a one-off project.
Despite the potential benefits, achieving true optimization is not without challenges. Data quality is critical; APIs rely on accurate input from cloud providers, on-premise infrastructure, and energy grid operators. Inconsistent or incomplete data can limit the usefulness of insights. Integration can also be complex, as IT teams often work with multiple systems, including DevOps pipelines, FinOps dashboards, and ESG platforms. Embedding carbon optimization into these workflows may require careful planning or custom development.
Cultural alignment is another key factor. Engineers are trained to prioritize uptime, performance, and cost, while sustainability teams focus on emissions reduction. Bridging this gap requires a mindset shift across the organization. The whitepaper highlights that most ESG teams lack granular IT data, while IT teams often lack sustainability expertise. APIs can bridge this gap, but only if organizations actively foster cross-functional collaboration. When these challenges are addressed, companies can achieve measurable gains in efficiency, cost reduction, and carbon footprint mitigation.
Looking ahead, several trends are shaping the next phase of IT sustainability. Real-time grid carbon intensity tracking is becoming increasingly available, allowing organizations to schedule workloads in alignment with renewable energy availability. Predictive workload placement, powered by machine learning, enables teams to choose the most carbon-efficient regions or compute resources before deploying new workloads. Infrastructure can also be autoscaled dynamically with carbon efficiency in mind, balancing performance needs with sustainability goals.
Regulatory standards are evolving as well, and APIs are playing a critical role in ensuring that organizations can meet more standardized, auditable, and actionable reporting requirements across multiple frameworks. Companies that adopt these emerging capabilities will not only improve their environmental performance but also reduce costs, enhance operational agility, and strengthen their competitive position in the market.
The story of IT sustainability is evolving. Reporting was only the first chapter; the future belongs to organizations that leverage carbon data to make smarter IT decisions in real time—optimizing workloads, reducing waste, and aligning infrastructure with renewable energy availability.
IT Carbon APIs enable this transformation. They turn emissions from a compliance burden into a decision-making lever, enabling IT leaders to reduce both costs and carbon footprint. As the whitepaper emphasizes, optimization APIs are the missing link in IT’s transition to GreenOps, allowing emissions data to actively inform operations rather than simply documenting them.
Organizations that embrace this shift early will not only meet regulatory requirements but also gain a competitive edge in efficiency, innovation, and stakeholder trust. Platforms like OxygenIT are making these optimization APIs accessible today, giving companies the tools to move confidently from reporting to actionable sustainability.
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