Cost governance has improved and cost visibility now drives daily compliant optimization
What is our primary use case?
My main use case is monitoring my cloud costs, security posture, and checking how my costs are aligning with actual activities and how they can be optimized on a day-to-day basis.
The main use case is around cost optimization, governance, and ensuring compliance is maintained. CloudCheckr is used to identify idle resources, oversized instances, and opportunities for savings through right-sizing and reservations.
In my day-to-day work, most of my time is spent ensuring compliance and preventing overspending. Our costs are optimized properly, and the major use case involves identifying and ensuring that all finances are used effectively and efficiently while aligning with overall application needs and growth prospects.
What is most valuable?
CloudCheckr is an excellent tool overall. The feature that stands out is how it enables cost savings and efficiency. The cost visibility and reporting are really valuable, and the dashboard is informative and enables good decision-making. The actionable recommendations are beneficial, such as the auto-generated suggestions for optimization. The built-in security and compliance checks, along with scheduled reports, save a lot of manual effort and keep both engineering and finance teams aligned.
CloudCheckr has been great and has helped solve problems by ensuring proper compliance. It does not just show data; it highlights actionable items for cost savings, security improvements, and compliance gaps. Scheduled reports are received on a regular basis according to defined schedules, providing more insights that can be shared with leadership and finance teams to ensure alignment. This results in a better picture where everyone is aligned and focused on growth while effectively and efficiently using financial resources.
CloudCheckr has enabled an average cost saving of approximately 25% from the last year, and this occurred while also increasing the scale of production. It has significantly reduced manual efforts that would otherwise be spent manually checking costs, tracking where spending is occurring, and verifying whether everything is properly optimized.
What needs improvement?
Some aspects could be made more customizable, such as the dashboard and UI. Some features may be too advanced and may have a learning curve, potentially lacking customization. Overall, CloudCheckr is a powerful and feature-rich tool with abundant metrics.
The primary suggestion would be to add more customization levels. Since the platform is very feature-rich, the UI may feel overwhelming sometimes. Fixing this would be beneficial. More customizable reports and configurations would be an improvement. The learning curve could be simplified, but once familiar with the tool, it is excellent.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CloudCheckr for two years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudCheckr is quite scalable and can be scaled across multiple cloud environments and multiple accounts.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate customer service as excellent. Sometimes support needs to be reached, but they are very responsive and supportive.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before CloudCheckr, I relied on AWS native tools only, such as Cost Explorer. I needed more granularity and in-depth cost analysis, which is why I switched to this solution. The goal also included extending to multi-cloud to some extent.
What was our ROI?
As shared earlier, there has been approximately a 25% decrease in optimized spending compared to roughly one year ago. Overall, the level of operations has increased with this solution. It has reduced manual efforts that would otherwise be spent checking where spending is occurring and ensuring all teams use resources correctly. This part has been eliminated and has saved significant effort while ensuring all teams remain aligned at all times.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing and licensing are quite convenient. I am not certain about the exact costs involved because another team handles that aspect. Overall, the pricing was quite convenient and represented good value for money.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Other tools such as CloudHealth and Apptio were assessed. They are good and quite strong, but CloudCheckr offered a better balance between cost, security, and compliance in one platform, which is why this solution was chosen.
What other advice do I have?
CloudCheckr is quite good overall and does not need much improvement. Some aspects could be made more customizable, such as the dashboard and UI, and some features may be too advanced with a learning curve while lacking customization. Overall, CloudCheckr is a powerful and feature-rich tool with abundant metrics.
CloudCheckr is an excellent product and a solid cloud management platform that effectively combines cost optimization, security, and compliance. I definitely recommend it to organizations seeking in-depth cost analysis, cost optimization, management of multiple accounts, or maturity in cloud governance. I rate this product a 9 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Spot platform aligns all cross-organizational accounts from different CSP for cloud cost governance
What do you like best about the product?
Spot platform by NetApp enables us to assign mandatory tags on all deployed resources, which helps in cloud resource cost segregation quickly.
We can map our cloud infrastructure footprint under a single dashboard & utlize its recommendations to evaluate potential savings.
It provides comprehensive governance control to identify unneded resource deployments and carry out its decomissioning activities in our cloud environments.
What do you dislike about the product?
Since its resource analyzer is cloud-based utility backed up by a cloud provider & region, the availability of Spot instances may fluctuate & may affect the feasibility of cloud optimization strategies.
This is applicable to all service platforms that rely upon Cloud Service Provider (CSP), hence its not a major downside, looking at the overall cloud spend management.
By streamlining our workloads with Spot insights, we determine cost predictions & estimate resource expenditures based on historical data & changes in the anticipated workloads.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Spot platform effectively benefits us by allowing us to identify all underutilized & idle resources which can be terminated for saving resource expenditures.
We can conveniently tag critical resources which handle our priority workload, so that it can be monitored & won't be accidentally interrupted by other deployments.
It offers single pane of glass visibility on various metrics such as cost prediction, resource utilization, and cost trends which greatly helps with our cloud cost analysis.
Since it supports cross-organizational accounts from different CSP, we can quickly build a centralized overview dashboard for resource reclamation, instance optimization and cloud cost governance stategies.
A stable and scalable solution that enables users to evaluate spending and lower their expenses
What is our primary use case?
We had not been evaluating the spending for our group. So we used CloudCheckr to evaluate what we had running and how much it cost to turn off what we did not need.
What is most valuable?
The solution is scalable for our purposes.
What needs improvement?
I found it less useful. My group took the data and organized it with Tableau. I used CloudCheckr to verify what I was seeing in Tableau. The solution must improve its user interface.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for two weeks.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I did not see any instability. I rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Tableau is more useful than CloudCheckr.
What other advice do I have?
People wanting to use the solution must check the documentation and be prepared for a learning curve. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
The product is not complete, with some bugs and pages to be improved. The service of spot is good
What do you like best about the product?
The service in chat
the simplicity of the product
a variety of possibilities to use the product
What do you dislike about the product?
The brazilian reseller dont know about the product
the documentation is confusing
some aws permissions is confusing to understanding
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I want to reduce my bill with aws in 30%. My best try is with spotinst
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Its a great option to reduce the AWS bill! Easy to use and great results
Great product overall
What do you like best about the product?
Significantly cuts cloud cost.
Gives applications enough time to gracefully shutdown before evictions most of the time.
Syncs very well with AWS EKS and is very easy to use
What do you dislike about the product?
Pricing is a bit off due to calculation errors. Cost is calculated as a portion of saved expenses - however, these are calculated based on machine types you might not usually use anyway, and therefor calculation is off..
API is not maintained making it difficult to integrate with pipelines.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost reduction. Machine type control and label management
Great idea that saves money
What do you like best about the product?
The knowledge and assistance the support has.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes, the need to reconfigure my environment
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Saving money while managing the environment efficiently.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Nice product and good to have.
Overall we are a happy Spot Ocean user for around 2 years
What do you like best about the product?
Spot Ocean is working in the background and in general we don't need to tweak it too often. It is giving us the cost benefits, with basically no toil at all on the long run. We are using Ocean with almost all our EKS clusters.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is hard to say much that I dislike. Of course, Ocean is an extra layer of abstraction that we need to think about and take it into the calculation, when we are thinking about reserved instances or spot instances. At the same time, utilizing it with Spot ECO, it is relatively simple.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have a fairly seasonal traffic both within a week and within a year. Having many stateless services, our compute resource requirements are fairly varying - following that while also using our instance types and available resources optimally, is a task that is automated for us by Spot Ocean.
Spot Ocean Review
What do you like best about the product?
Spot Ocean simplifies my operations in a way that it's easier to scale
What do you dislike about the product?
I think Spot could come with a larger platform for learning how to manage the benefits it could bring to the table
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have been analyzing and lowering operational costs
