Cloud cost management is an area that needs your maximum attention whether you are planning your cloud-move or while you’re already on the cloud.
As 67% of the enterprises state that cloud cost management and optimization have helped them grow their revenue, make sure that you have all the optimization best practices and tools in place to be on the revenue radar.
From right-sizing resources and utilizing reserved instances to automating infrastructure and monitoring usage, implementing these strategies can lead to significant cost savings and improved efficiency for your business.
So, here are 6 cloud cost management tools that help you optimize the above-mentioned strategies along with more of their in-built cost control capabilities.
Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Tools That Work Best For You
1. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a built-in tool from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that helps you understand and manage your AWS cloud costs. You can identify the main drivers of your costs, and make informed decisions about optimizing your cloud costs before things spiral out of your hands. Get instant access to detailed cost and usage analysis, as well as cloud cost optimization recommendations.
With this tool, easily view and analyze your costs and usage over time, set custom budgets, and receive alerts when costs exceed those budgets. Additionally, you can also create custom reports, and access detailed information about your usage of different AWS services.
Features:
- Cost allocation tags
- Cost and usage analysis
- Custom budgets and alerts
- Cost and usage anomaly detection
- Integration with other AWS services
2. Azure Cost Management
A free built-in tool for the users of Microsoft Azure, Azure Cost Management gives you an in-depth insight into your cloud costs and helps optimize them. Understand the intricacies of your billing and get a bird’s eye view of your expenditure. Being a highly customizable tool, you can effortlessly integrate Azure Cost Management with other tools to gain control on all aspects of the cloud and fully leverage its capabilities.
Track and allocate costs across different projects, departments, or other business units. This can be done by using tags to identify, track and allocate costs to specific projects, departments, or other business units. The tool also integrates with other Azure services such as Azure Policy and Azure Automation, allowing for automated cost management and governance.
Features:
- Assistance in managing billing information for both Azure and AWS
- Offers suggestions for improved spending
- Enablement of budgeting alerts
- Highly customizable
3. CloudZero
A robust and user-friendly cloud cost management tool that keeps your cloud-spend in check – that’s what CloudZero is all about! Get precise cost breakdowns of cloud spending, including a breakdown of costs by service, account, and resource without the need for manual tagging.
You will be given recommendations for reducing costs by:
- Rightsizing underutilized resources
- Identifying and eliminating wasted resources
- Identifying opportunities for reserved instance purchasing
A wide range of features helps you enforce cost management policies and control spending, including the ability to set budgets and alerts and to create custom tagging and cost allocation rules. Understand and predict your cloud spending patterns by leveraging its advanced analytics capabilities, such as trend analysis, forecasting, custom reporting, etc.
Features:
- Code-driven approach
- Real-time cost monitoring
- Multi-cloud environments support
- Highly automated to fetch you relevant data
- Intuitive UI and navigations for report filtering
- Slack notifications when it identifies cost irregularities
4. Cloudability
With capabilities such as monitoring, rightsizing, and forecasting, Cloudability is considered to be one of the finest cloud cost management tools for analyzing your cloud costs. You can schedule reserved instances, control container costs, identify irregularities, issue alerts, and discover cost-saving opportunities. IT, financial, and DevOps teams can make the best use of it as the tool enables the teams to work together to optimize cloud resources for efficiency, cost, speed, and quality.
You will also be given recommendations on how to optimize your cloud usage and costs. To offer more in-depth information on cloud costs, Cloudability can be integrated with cloud monitoring solutions like PageDuty and DataDog to pull relevant data. To further organize and control cloud expenditures, the tool offers a variety of tagging options, mapping, views, dashboards, and reports.
Features:
- Budget forecasting
- Multi-cloud support
- Role-based access control
- Provides an API for automation and integrations
5. CloudHealth
CloudHealth is the native cloud cost management tool of VMware; they also provide another version of the tool for AWS users as well. Through the showback and chargeback features of CloudHealth, you can identify the cost centers that are escalating your cloud costs, thereby boosting cloud cost accountability. Keep track of your cloud expenses regularly and utilize that information to foresee potential cloud costs.
You can also download cost reports and find chances for right-sizing and wasted spend. Set policies and alerts for cost and usage, ensuring compliance with organizational standards. Make your job easier with the automation capability of the tool and automate tasks such as instance scaling, rightsizing, and cost forecasting. Cloud rightsizing becomes your cup of tea as CloudHealth helps organizations identify and adjust the size of their cloud resources to optimize cost and performance.
Features:
- Anomaly detection
- Migration cost planning
- Cost allocation & chargeback
- Commitment-based discount management
6. Harness
Harness is a cloud cost management solution for optimizing your cloud costs by diligently identifying abnormalities, establishing a spending cap, and providing visibility into your cloud resources (apps, environments, clusters, etc.). Additionally, it forecasts your cloud expenditure and supports several connectors.
By offering insights such as idle, utilized, and unallocated cloud resources, Harness enables IT teams to make data-driven decisions. Furthermore, it automates the management of idle resources. The engineering, finance, and IT teams of your company can all benefit greatly from Harness. To prevent exceeding or unexpected expenditures, you can also set a spending cap.
Features:
- Multi-cloud cost visibility
- Spot instance orchestration
- IP address whitelist management
- Automated cloud resource tagging
- Built-in continuous delivery platform
Also, invest in a smart cloud infrastructure with the right resources and avoid redundancies. Developing a cloud cost management and optimization strategy can go a long way in saving your business from spiraling expenses.
SecureKloud – Your Cloud Cost Optimization Partner
With our proven cloud cost optimization processes, we assist you in streamlining your IT processes across cloud environments while simultaneously guaranteeing industry-specific security and compliance.
Your cloud cost management and optimization will be made possible by our cloud experts through our six essential approaches:
- Rightsizing
- Cost Optimization
- Scaling & Scheduling
- Resource Monitoring
- Assessment & Alignment
- Automated Security & Compliance
Create a resourceful cloud ecosystem that is optimized for network, storage, compute, and operations, lowering resource redundancy and increasing cost-effectiveness.
So, if exceeding cloud-spend is really your concern, our experts are here to help you out.
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