The cloud vendor bill is just line items on compute/storage/network spend. Are there tools to go beyond the surface and help understand the costs, and optimize cloud consumption? (Note this is not a question of cost saving in the cloud, I have seen the Q&A on that topic in the forums).
Director of Technology Strategy in Services (non-Government), 2 - 10 employees
Would cloud monitoring be the focus for you here? If so, there are some options available for you such as here 20 Best Cloud Monitoring Tools & Services [2021 Comparison] - SematextThese are only going to be as good as how they are configured though, so it would be helpful to have someone around who knows what they are doing.
Director of Data Science in Healthcare and Biotech, 10,001+ employees
We use https://turbot.com/, to both control the security of our cloud environment as well as cost monitoring. It allows users to use AWS with guardrails and security best practices as well as assessing whether resources aren't being fully utilized.Chief Information Officer in Manufacturing, 10,001+ employees
Additional tools to dive below the cloud surface line items would be monitoring, SLAs, KPIs, etc. As a CIO or Technical Director, you'll want to ensure that as part of any service you have access to these types of tools to evaluate the effectiveness of the line items being expensed for. Having the ability to utilize these types of tools allows the CIO to provide ROI, justification cases, or evaluate compliance. These days there are a few of the areas that are required to document and report back to the organization to provide a value add.CIO in Software, 51 - 200 employees
We use AWS and there are quite a few tools that we use case on case. For lambda, I extensively use their optimizer. For EC2, I use monitor and loads. There are quite a few vendors (like Dash) which offered us to provide a consolidated view, however our DevOps team developed scripts using BOTO which detects low usage and less usage times and shut down servers, RDS is comparatively high item cost which I am yet to get a handle on how to reduce bills. However our internal project (called OPtimized Infrastructure Utilization Management - OPIUM) resulted in our bills down by 70%. My dev teams are building an ELK based in house solution. Serves our purposeVP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees
If the goal, problem to solve is around deeper understanding and visibility into computing, storage, and network, for example, I would recommend the following below, it's extremely important to have the proper tags/value in place, better yet make the tagging within cloud services part of your infrastructure as code deployment method. - https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-advisor/
- https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management
If you arent familiar with, AWS budgets is another place to visit, the sooner you start the better to get a sense of the various run/solution costs.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aws-budgets-michael-wahl/
VP in Construction, 51 - 200 employees
AWS has the "Cost Explorer" and GCP has the cloud bill.Regarding your question I would say that understanding what you want in a cloud service and then relating to what the vendor bill provides will help you access your spends, and you would know what service to add, and how much to remove. The above bill types gives you a run down of what each service will cost and of course what they are for, so you will be able to choose what you want. Though some times these billing systems can get complicated, but you need patience.
It is quite difficult to really get the exact tool you might need, use the above tools, add budget tools etc so you can optimize both cost and consumption.
Executive Architect in Healthcare and Biotech, 10,001+ employees
There are good recommendations here, and I'm glad Michael Wahl emphasized the use of tags, which can be associated as metadata for resources on Oracle Cloud infrastructure, Azure and AWS. Well-organized tags will allow you to slice and dice usage and capture insight from the Oracle Cost Analysis dashboard and similar offerings from the other hyperscalers. Note you'll want to establish tags to classify usage by organizational unit, business purpose, and resource type for minimum clarity on spending.CIO in Manufacturing, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
I'm not a customer but just received a compelling presentation from Burstorm. They enable tracking cloud (and on-prem) spend and also provide benchmark cost & consumption information to enable optimization. https://www.burstorm.com/enterprise-how-we-help/VP of IT in Media, 10,001+ employees
I’ve seen tools both from the providers themselves and from 3rd parties , as well as provider training on how to size and select based on your needs .Content you might like
CTO in Software, 201 - 500 employees
Without a doubt - Technical Debt! It's a ball and chain that creates an ever increasing drag on any organization, stifles innovation, and prevents transformation.Time savings for our internal IT team25%
Cost savings (i.e. subscription model)41%
Access to innovative technologies17%
Peace of mind5%
"Always-on" monitoring for risks10%
Other (I'll explain below)2%
241 PARTICIPANTS
Yes80%
No11%
Somewhat9%
102 PARTICIPANTS
We use AWS, recently I'd had a meeting with them and they gave me really good pointers to decrease the costs ( Up to 60% so far ).
I strongly recommend you contact them, it might help you.