I am curious if anyone has recommendations for an objective third party to provide an external evaluation of GCP environments from a Fin Ops/Cost Optimization perspective. Many suppliers in the space selling reporting toolsets or serving as VARs but am interested in finding an independent third party.

I have conducted my own investigation and analysis using native cloud platform tooling, applying the Technology Business Management (TBM) taxonomy, and LeanIX, to help understand cloud costs. Apptio is another product I was looking at as well to help improve cloud costs. Apptio is easily integrated with LeanIX. https://www.apptio.com/products/ibm-apptio/ https://www.leanix.net/en/enterprise-architecture/integrations#apptio

Cloudability is AppTio’s FinOps certified platform to enable cloud cost optimization efforts:

https://www.apptio.com/products/cloudability/

My opinion is that I don’t trust independent third-party’s (consultants) to take an unbiased approach nor even have an effective diligent approach. I have had average to poor experiences with third-party’s that management in my previous organization brought in to conduct an investigation. Given good tooling and a decent budget I think you are better off creating your own cloud centre of excellence that follows best practices for workload cost management and optimization.

Lastly, I read the recent post from Curt Hodge on that question, he is recommending PointFive. I had a look at PointFive’s website information and I would agree with Curt’s recommendation to take a closer look at the PointFive solution https://www.pointfive.co/ however at first glance they seem to be AWS focused and there is no mention of GCP integration.

We recently helped few enterprise customers in the US on their FinOps journey on AWS and GCP. As you rightly mentioned we don't use a boiler plate reporting tool sets to suggest cost saving options.

Our team spends time to understand

- Your application architecture and engineering mindset
- End user usage analytics and performance metrics
- Cloud consumption patterns in production, staging, test and dev environments

To identify the areas where process can be optimized to realize long term and predictable savings in addition to one time savings through optimization.

Happy to share how we saved a enterprise customer $500 K on their cloud spend, reducing it by 45% .

Feel free to reach out on vikas@gtentechnologies.com

I'm not sure it's really what you're looking for, but we recently launched a FinOps program using PointFive. This isn't an externally led evaluation from a consulting standpoint, but instead is a tool that looks at your public cloud usage and identifies a list of savings opportunities that you should investigate. They are a VERY new company but we looked at a lot of solutions and found theirs to be compelling. My guess is you'd find them very competitive on pricing as they are looking to bring on customers and establish themselves in the market. You could use them for a year to identify cost savings and track which ones you want to ignore (e.g., some rightsizing savings can't be acheived for business reasons) and which ones you've successfully resolved, then get rid of it if you don't feel you want to run an ongoing FinOps program. One big caveat is that their core, initial focus was on AWS. They have GCP support in beta right now, so I'm not sure if it's too new to be ready for your needs. Anyway, I'd  recommend you at least check out PointFive if you are willing to let the tool be your "external consultant".