CloudCheckr - Govern and Optimize AWS at Scale

My main use cases for CloudCheckr  include cloud cost visibility and optimization, identifying idle resources, right-sizing, and cost trends. I also use it from a cloud governance perspective, for security and compliance monitoring, and as a managed service provider for reporting to end customers.

One example of how I use CloudCheckr  is through our managed services provider operations where we manage public cloud environments for many end customers. One of the most impressive features is the MSP reporting, which allows us to see how much each customer is spending on the public cloud, obtain a holistic view, generate customer invoicing, create specific dashboards for individual customers based on their use case and requirements, and provide customized chargeback.

Another important aspect of my use case for CloudCheckr is identifying idle resources. We leverage CloudCheckr to identify idle resources, assist with right-sizing and over-provisioned resources, and reduce the cloud cost bill for many of our end customers and our own environment.

The best features CloudCheckr offers include out-of-the-box security and compliance check features that provide over 35 different types of compliance checks at no cost, best practice checks, and alerts. Another valuable feature is the multi-cloud overview, providing unified reporting across AWS  and Azure  while allowing us to create different types of dashboards based on who logs into the platform. Additionally, from an MSP standpoint, there is good ease of deployment, especially the billing and chargeback functionality for a reseller or managed services provider.

CloudCheckr has positively impacted my organization by helping us manage multiple customers and tens of thousands of resources while retaining performance and visibility due to its multi-cloud support. We do not have to worry about jumping from one platform to another, and the better MSP support is beneficial from a billing and chargeback automation standpoint. The integration in compliance helps identify missing areas within our customer environments and improves them. On average, it has helped us provide approximately 15 to 20% savings through right-sizing or idle resource elimination. These are some of the immediate cost savings our customers have experienced after implementing recommendations from the tool.

Areas where CloudCheckr can be improved include simplifying the user experience, as some areas seem complex to my teammates, who felt overwhelmed by the many dashboards available. Another area is drift analysis; there have been complaints about tracking optimization opportunities, such as how to track opportunities identified in January and whether they were resolved in February. We also noticed performance issues with very large data sets, and from an integration standpoint, more integration with third-party tools would be beneficial to the platform.

I have been using CloudCheckr for approximately five to six years.

CloudCheckr is decently stable.

CloudCheckr's scalability is impressive. It scales well for MSPs and large enterprises, allowing for management of hundreds of accounts and tens of thousands of resources while retaining performance and visibility.

I was not satisfied with the customer support from CloudCheckr. I did have some good support from a dedicated account manager or technical account manager. However, additional support took a couple of days and involved back-and-forth communication that did not yield the technical input we needed. The additional support ended up taking longer than expected, with responses that did not meet our need for detailed and technical assistance.

Before CloudCheckr, we were using native cloud consoles and cost tools such as AWS Cost Explorer  and Azure Cost Management . We switched to CloudCheckr because it is a more holistic, centralized cost reporting platform across multiple public cloud providers, offers better MSP support from a billing and chargeback standpoint, and includes substantial automation to generate customer invoicing. The security and compliance feature within the platform was also extremely beneficial.

The setup process is quick and straightforward. In many use cases, integration of cloud accounts is done in under two hours, which is quite good. Initial client creation can take one or two hours with guided setup. Some scenarios, such as creating policies or custom dashboards, take longer, but overall, the setup process is straightforward.

I have seen a return on investment of 100%, with significant cost avoidance and measurable savings within the first few months of deployment. There were fewer resources needed to monitor and manage the customer environment from a costing standpoint. We could implement many end customers, and with the automated customer invoicing feature, we significantly reduced the burden related to Excel sheets and pricing.

Pricing is feature-tiered under the MSP licensing, and I would say the pricing was quite competitive and fair. It was neither inexpensive nor too costly compared to competition, yet it provides good value.

The features of CloudCheckr I have not mentioned yet include the cost-saving recommendations, which are quite actionable.

For a specific example of a customer where CloudCheckr's recommendations led to 15 to 20% savings, we recently onboarded a customer from a managed services standpoint who had multiple accounts in different cloud providers, AWS  and Azure , accumulated over the years due to various acquisitions. There was initially no oversight of who was provisioning resources, what it cost each business unit, or where resources were deployed. Once we leveraged CloudCheckr and connected it to those different customer environments, we created a single dashboard to obtain a holistic view of their spending across AWS and Azure, allowing our team to save time and effort by reducing the need to go through each individual account. For the end customer, we identified idle and unused resources, categorizing those not used for the last 60 days. We identified all those resources, including public IPs, virtual machines, and storage. We also found many over-provisioned resources being utilized at only 30 to 40%. By leveraging the right-sizing recommendation, we successfully right-sized those resources, and the customer ended up saving roughly 20 to 25% using the platform.

My advice for others looking into using CloudCheckr includes configuring tags and the chargeback mechanism early during onboarding to the platform, creating automated alerts for budget increases, aligning with security posture checks and compliance frameworks, and ensuring custom dashboards are created for different stakeholders accessing the platform. I would rate CloudCheckr a seven on a scale of one to ten.

We use the solution primarily to look at Azure consumption data for our clients.

The product gives some recommendations on how cost can be optimized based on usage. We take those recommendations and have discussions with our clients on what they can potentially do to achieve cost savings.

The dashboards were useful for visualizing where the cost and consumption are allocated. The recommendation section is pretty helpful. It provides an analysis of where cost and consumption can be adjusted.

We are not happy with the product’s reporting capabilities. We are planning to change the solution. The security compliance feature doesn’t give much data because CloudCheckr has done a majority of its development on AWS. The majority of our clients are on Microsoft Azure. There are a lot of features and information available for Amazon, but not for Azure. The tool wasn't meeting our expectations.

The reporting and analytic capabilities are very limited. There's no ability to do scheduled email reports. The report could only be sent to a single email address. The tool was not very usable. We had multiple clients and tasks to work with.

I have been using the solution for roughly two years.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten. We haven’t had any usability issues.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Initially, our experience with support was not that good. Eventually, there was a discussion with our account representative, and we got some additional support to help us through some of the issues we were having. It is easy to create and submit cases. It was also easy to get updates on cases. It's pretty simple.

The solution has an online portal that we can use to submit cases. However, the type of responses we got back, and the level of assistance from the support persons reviewing our cases were not what we needed. We needed a little bit more in-depth help, which the team couldn’t provide. We had to go directly to our account representative to get the right response.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was standard. I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. The deployment was very quick. We can have the tool up and running within a couple of hours. Adding clients or tenants to the tool takes 45 to 50 minutes as long as we have the developer access to the tenant to set up the configuration. A cloud architect and I deploy the solution.

We do not do any maintenance for the tool. It is a SaaS tool. It is hosted by the provider. However, the data is not stored by the tool. The tool reads data from different Azure tenants that we configure on it. The data isn't written anywhere. It's just read from the Microsoft tenant.

The price depends on the actual Azure consumption and what we feed into it. The cost is on par with other providers.

CloudBolt seems to have better reporting. It has a lot more flexibility in reporting. The support is so far better than what CloudCheckr offers.

Overall, I rate the tool a six out of ten.