IBM Cloudability

I use Cloudability  to track costs across a multi-cloud infrastructure estate, including Google Cloud , AWS  Cloud, and Microsoft Azure . Everything from reports and dashboards to anomaly alerts and right-sizing is managed through Cloudability .

I regularly use the reporting feature in Cloudability. If I'm trying to figure out how much cost is attributed to a specific account, I'd create a report based on the account name. That allows for historical tracking of how the costs have maybe increased or decreased over time, and that's quite useful.

In addition to my main use case, I use the dashboards feature regularly as well. If I want to have a higher view level of what cloud costs are within the estate, I would use the dashboards because I can look at multiple cloud accounts at once.

Cloudability positively impacts my organization by allowing for greater cost observability, which then drives better spending decisions and reduces costs. I've definitely seen those benefits from using the tool, and because of the breadth and depth of the features that the tool offers, you can get really specifically into minute costs. You can save money at the high level by looking across the entire estate, or you can really drill down to save specific costs, making cost saving the biggest benefit.

I can't share any specific metrics around cost savings or decision-making improvements because they'd be business sensitive, but through the right-sizing feature and the commitment manager feature, it's common to save anywhere from 10 to 20% of costs across an entire estate just by right-sizing instances to the right level and then purchasing commitments. Commitments save anywhere between 30 to 50% when executed, so if you're able to do that across a good number of instances, you can easily achieve 10% plus cost savings, which could be massive if your organization has a large cloud spend.

The best features Cloudability offers include the reporting feature, which is good because you can get very detailed, not just at the cloud account level, but you can drill down into particular resource usage. You can look at costs over granular periods of time, like one day or a few hours, and that's really good. The Views feature is also beneficial because lots of teams may use Cloudability within an organization, allowing users to segregate data to particular Views so they are only looking at what's relevant to them.

The Views feature in Cloudability is very useful for my teams because if you're in an organization that has hundreds or maybe even thousands of cloud accounts, different teams only operate in specific accounts rather than across all of them. A good way to use Views is to section data based on things such as business unit or which engineering team an individual is part of, so the data can thus be scoped down to specifically the engineer's ownership.

The IAM  feature is something that we struggle with using. IBM, the company that runs Cloudability, released the Groups feature back in the summer of 2025. While Groups can be used in some parts of the tool, it can't be used across the entire tool. I've found that Groups is basically unusable because if it can't be used everywhere, you would have to run both group-based access control and direct user-based access control at the same time, which doesn't make any sense. The Groups feature has improved over time, but it's still not something we feel we can use on an everyday basis, so the IAM  section remains an issue right now.

Most of the tool is very well-functioning and developed, and that's the only real improvement area that we've seen.

I've been using Cloudability for around two years.

Cloudability is very stable. We haven't noticed any downtime.

Cloudability's scalability is excellent because it can link with as few as one cloud account to thousands of cloud accounts, so there are no issues there.

The customer support from Cloudability is great. We regularly talk with IBM, and they help us a lot. I have no complaints at all. They're very good.

We've previously used the direct integrated FinOps features within cloud platforms. In AWS , there's the cost and accounts management section, and we've used similar functionalities in GCP and Azure . While those tools were good, Cloudability offers even deeper features and, because it's multi-cloud, it allows for costs to be seen in one place across all three cloud providers, which is the reason we wanted to use it.

Pricing and setup cost for Cloudability are good. Compared to the rest of the industry, they may be a little more expensive than some other FinOps tools, but that's to be expected because they have more functionality. So while it's a bit more expensive, you also get value for money because of the breadth and depth of the features.

I have seen a return on investment using Cloudability. As I mentioned before, it'd be very easy to save at least 10 to 20% costs from cloud spend just by utilizing the features of right-sizing or commitments management that Cloudability offers.

Pricing and setup cost for Cloudability are good. Compared to the rest of the industry, they may be a little more expensive than some other FinOps tools, but that's to be expected because they have more functionality. So while it's a bit more expensive, you also get value for money because of the breadth and depth of the features.

We didn't evaluate other vendors before choosing Cloudability; we simply evaluated using the built-in cloud provider tooling. The reason for this is that Cloudability is the market leader and has a strong reputation.

I would rate Cloudability a nine on a scale of 1 to 10.

I give it a nine because it's a very good tool with many different features, and the only thing that would push it up to a 10 is if the group IAM  access control was more developed. However, that's a minor thing and doesn't affect the core functionality of the tool.

I would recommend using Cloudability and linking it with all cloud providers because the multi-cloud benefit really is great. IBM documentation is good, and their support service is brilliant as well. I would recommend using the tool.

I usually work with Cloudability  for cost optimization, cost analysis, reporting, and resource and cost management, mostly focusing on the FinOps side.

The features of Cloudability  I find most valuable depend on the kind of report I need and which resource type I want to optimize. I find the reports to be extensive and elaborate, and I get whatever information I require.

If I don't get what I need, I build automation tools that can read the reports and provide the required cost optimization outputs in the needed format. If there are any VMs, SQL storage, or other resources that are not right-sized, I identify them and report that.

At this moment, I don't have specific opinions on how Cloudability could be improved or enhanced. I'm using it as a major source of information for my team, but I'm not the right person to suggest enhancements.

I believe that automating all manual processes in Cloudability would be beneficial, providing a proactive prescriptive analysis on what needs to be done to lower costs; however, this might also keep us out of business.

Enhancements could be made in the user interface and customization, and leveraging GenAI would be an area for improvement in Cloudability.

I have been working with Cloudability for the last one year.

I work on the cloud platform primarily. I work on Google Cloud  Platform's cost optimization where I identify opportunities and resources to optimize costs for customers, including infrastructure costs and BigQuery  costs. This also encompasses managing unused backups, data, decommissioning, archiving, right-sizing VM instances, and slot consumption.

I am a consultant, not an end user of this solution. I use it internally in my company, and I collect data for the customers as I work in LTI Mindtree.

Cloudability's customizable alerts help me maintain budgetary goals by providing recommendations and alerts on slot usages. It also alerts me if some VM suddenly causes a spike in cost and usage. We look at the policies in place for infrastructure optimization concerning Compute Engine, persistent disks, MIGs, and VMs, and we leverage decommissioning of VMs or persistent disks and right-sizing the Compute Engine to ensure the customer doesn't go on demand and has an appropriate size of reserved instances allocated, thereby lowering costs proactively.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Cloudability a six out of ten.

Usually, it is used by large companies with a high amount of cloud spend. Something like more than 5 million dollars a year. And, usually, we face multi-cloud challenges.

The list of optimizations that are proposed by Cloudability has been most effective in reducing cloud expenditure for our customers. Another one is the capacity to deep dive into the consumption and be able, in a very easy way, to analyze your issues or peaks of traffic, something like that, to explain what you should investigate.

I like its ability to create, in a very easy way, relevant dashboards. Secondly, all the tagging and mapping, which helps to create some virtual tags. And, all the forecast and budget features, that allow creating, for each user or application owner, their own budget in a very friendly way.

The first one is, how to help users, especially practitioners, stick to their commitment plan. For example, how can I use Cloudability to help me optimize my selling plan and my residential plan?

The second feature I'd like to see is a combination of cost visualization and a sustainability approach. I want to see how much cost I consume in the cloud and what my CO2 footprint is.

So, cost visualization and a sustainability approach are the two things I would like.

I would improve the integration, or the preparation of the integration, for a complex environment. I think that we usually assume, "Well, this is easy to integrate." In a very complex optimization, this can become very complex. This is where I think we need to be much more prepared, with up-to-date points, to evaluate the complexity of the landing zone or the account to connect. We also need to make sure that we put all the requirements in front of the customer to make sure that we don't fail in the integration.

I have been using it for three years.

I only have one subscription. I always work with the latest version because this is a unique SaaS environment.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. I don't have an issue with the stability itself. As, this is not a tool that has a strong impact on your productivity. If stability is out for one, two, three, four hours, it will not affect your business.

So it's stable, but if there were any outages, it still wouldn't affect.

I haven't reached the limit of the scale of scalability. So, there are the number, the volume of assets, or the volume of data to acquire in terms of the number of days of consumption you acquired. We

I'm not connected with a customer who has reached any limitations. Our customers are mostly mid-size companies.

If you deal with a very large cloud environment with multiple accounts and so on, it can be complex sometimes due to some issues with admin rights.

However, if you deal with a single cloud environment that is very simple in terms of structure, the integration of Cloudability is straightforward.

For example, if you want to acquire all the cost data of a very large company and you have access directly to the higher, privileged accounts, there's no issue. If you want the same company to acquire or use Cloudability just for a subsidiary that is fully dependent on the parent company, it's starting to be complex.

In a very easy, straightforward approach, it can take two, three days to get the data into Cloudability. But if we face a more difficult integration with some problems of security, account privilege, and so on, it can take a couple of weeks.

First, we analyze the scope to be integrated. Then, we define, in the hierarchy of the cloud structure, what we will integrate. Next, we do all the design in terms of how we can access the data, or if there are any security rules that don't allow us to acquire all the data.

Then, we proceed to the integration, which means we create all the repository buckets in the cloud environment and then activate the API to collect the data. That's the integration process.

Last but not least, is to create, with the customer or the users, all the basic structure in terms of creating the accounts in the product, creating the first dashboard, all these things that lead to releasing an environment that is ready to use, to the users.

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive. Pricing is one of the main issues we face. Cloudability is actually expensive, and it's quite difficult to promote Cloudability to some customers or clients who have a small structure or who have not budgeted to acquire Cloudability.

The price of the license or the usage is a percentage of the top consumption. So it varies from year to year. And, if you are a large customer with a significant amount of consumption, proportionally, Cloudability will be expensive. So the more you use, the more you pay.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten because now I expect to be able to have maybe something that is less expensive or reduce the number of features to benefit the main features and maybe pay later for all this.

We had a multi-cloud environment using both AWS  and Azure  to keep track of costs in one place. We used Cloudability  to understand and manage the spending across both clouds effectively.

We use Cloudability  to monitor costs and track the expenses of our subscriptions.

Cloudability takes care of identifying and managing the cloud. If you want to do it yourself, you must handle all the underlying data engineering, interface with all the tables, and generate the reports. Cloudability does that for you, providing many options to prepare dashboards within the product. You don't have to build code; you must provide the data interface or input. It helps you manage your spending across different clouds.

There are also some limitations with the dashboards and data representation in Cloudability. For example, if you choose Power BI, you have many options for data representation that are not necessarily available in Cloudability.

I have been using Cloudability for two years.

Cloudability offers valuable insights into data engineering and analytics platforms. With access to the same data Cloudability utilizes, one could recreate similar dashboards on their own data platform. This implies that Cloudability's role could be replaceable with some organizational effort, provided they have the necessary data sources and expertise. However, for organizations looking to streamline processes without investing extensive time, money, and resources into building their solution, Cloudability serves as a convenient option. Moreover, it offers benefits for both single-cloud and multi-cloud users. While it's beneficial for single-cloud users, it becomes particularly advantageous for organizations with multi-cloud environments, as it helps manage costs and optimize resources across different cloud providers.

We have created our dashboards, which gives us more control. For instance, we can refresh them weekly, whereas, in Cloudability, the setup is monthly. This provides us with more real-time data. However, it's worth noting that the level of detail varies for different resources and billing types. Sometimes, you may need to delve into the actual billings from Microsoft Azure  to obtain insights that aren't directly available from Cloudability.

Cloudability is beneficial if you understand the attributes well and if the billing configuration is optimized. Yet, if you require more control over reports and dashboards, similar to what other BI tools like Power BI offer, Cloudability might not be as robust. Improvements in this area could make it more appealing to different organizations.

Cloudability has yearly charges based on usage. It's not cheap.

Some dashboards are directly reported to management and cover all the applications we have on the cloud. Each application should have specific dashboards focusing on spending and resource utilization, and most should have these features.

For example, you can compare spending in a single cloud environment using Microsoft's Azure portal insights. From the tenant portal, you get detailed information that can be fed into Power BI to create custom dashboards. However, if you use a multi-cloud environment with AWS , Google Cloud , and Azure, it's more challenging to consolidate these insights. Cloudability is beneficial as it provides a unified view of spending and resource utilization across the entire organization, helping management track expenditures.

Cloudability is particularly useful for large organizations wanting to understand where they are spending more and make decisions about continuing with specific cloud providers. However, they need to consider the cost of Cloudability and whether they already have an in-house data platform. If they do, building similar capabilities internally might be more cost-effective.

Cloudability also provides insights about rightsizing resources, which is valuable at the organization or department level. However, it doesn't predict future scaling of data volumes; that knowledge lies with the application owners. If the data volumes are expected to remain stable, Cloudability's recommendations can be beneficial.

CloudOps with Cloudability is relatively straightforward and has an easy-to-use interface. It is more user-friendly than the Azure portal, making it easier to find relevant data. Users need to understand the cloud-specific terms and attributes to apply the correct filters.

Cloudability remains valuable, especially for teams or organizations not wanting to delve deeply into data engineering. It's an organization's go-to product, provided they have the budget. On the other hand, organizations committed to a single cloud setup with established data platforms and engineering capabilities might prefer building in-house solutions rather than using Cloudability, which might not offer all the customized features they need.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.