FinOps practice has transformed cloud cost visibility and delivers consistent spend optimization
What is our primary use case?
I use
CloudCheckr mostly for cloud cost visibility and compliance monitoring, and on a normal day, I would check into it and review the cost summary dashboard, check spend anomalies, and see which accounts or services have deviated from any set forecast. That is how I usually work for my clients.
Overall, I think it is a great thing having a FinOps toolkit and compliance dashboard, especially for me since I am a FinOps certified practitioner by the FinOps Foundation. From that background, using these tools is a really great way to implement those practices and also help our potential clients.
I use CloudCheckr on public cloud only, and I usually use it on AWS, most of the time on AWS and sometimes on Azure.
What is most valuable?
I think CloudCheckr also helps track unused or underutilized resources and reviewing any further insights on which quick actions need to be taken to optimize the spend and maintain compliance.
Another thing is the cost optimization recommendations, which are probably my favorite. They are actionable and easy to implement, and I also like how it can automatically generate reports. It also allows multi-account management, and the view for multi-account management is excellent, in my opinion.
It is the cost optimization tool, so it helps you get a detailed view of the entire cost structure, how the costs are rising, what all needs to be done to optimize the spend, and reduce any resource wastage. Overall, it has been really helpful for not only our organization but also for our clients by helping them optimize their cloud spends by nearly 20 to 30% on an average.
It combines cost, compliance, and governance into one platform across multiple clouds, and even across multiple cloud environments in some cases. It also provides better, deeper savings recommendations, and tagging enforcement, obviously automation of reports, which some of the native tools do not offer. That is why I think it is a really great tool.
What needs improvement?
Overall it is quite good, but adding a little more flexibility in building custom dashboards would be great, so you can export and customize and make the dashboards more powerful. That may be something which can be worked on, such as adding more flexibility to building those custom dashboards.
I think the AWS integration with CloudCheckr is good, but I think the Azure one is not that good, so there may be room for improvement there.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CloudCheckr for roughly two years now for managing the cloud costs of my clients.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CloudCheckr is quite stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudCheckr is quite scalable, and we can add other accounts, even scale it across the different cloud service providers such as from AWS to Azure to GCP, and I think it is really good in terms of scalability.
How are customer service and support?
I never needed to reach out to customer support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously we were using native cloud tools only, but as I mentioned earlier, the native cloud tools do not provide really good functionality, so there are many things missing. They do not provide cross-account visibility and do not provide other deeper insights of all the accounts and other enforcements and governance of the environments such as cost allocation. CloudCheckr provides a better picture of all the things, and it can also be used for multi-cloud environments.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other options. I think we evaluated a few other things such as CostIQ,
CloudHealth, and an IBM tool called
Cloudability. We analyzed those as well, but I think CloudCheckr was something which really stood out, and we really liked the interface and everything and the offerings it had. That is why we chose this.
What other advice do I have?
We did purchase CloudCheckr from the
AWS Marketplace.
Overall it was good, and the pricing is quite good based upon the usage costs and one-month contracts. I am not sure about the actual figures because that is handled by another team in our company, but I think the overall pricing is definitely good, and we definitely recommend it to some of our clients as well. You should definitely go for it.
I think we are good. I would be happy to discuss further. My overall rating of CloudCheckr is 10 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)
Cloud optimization has become faster and saves several hours of weekly operational work
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for CloudCheckr is for cloud services, as we upload our data to cloud services.
What is most valuable?
The best feature that CloudCheckr offers, even though I don't use it very often, is that it is easy to use.
What makes CloudCheckr easy for me to use is its intuitive interface.
CloudCheckr has impacted my organization positively by making things easier and saving time, approximately three hours a week.
What needs improvement?
An area where CloudCheckr can be improved is pricing.
There are no other improvements needed for CloudCheckr that I haven't mentioned.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CloudCheckr for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudCheckr's scalability is fantastic.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for CloudCheckr is fantastic.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not previously use a different solution before CloudCheckr.
How was the initial setup?
I purchased CloudCheckr through the AWS Marketplace.
CloudCheckr is deployed in my organization in a public cloud.
What about the implementation team?
My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
What was our ROI?
I have not yet seen a return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is fantastic.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing CloudCheckr, I did not evaluate other options.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise others looking into using CloudCheckr that it is a fantastic product. I give this product a rating of ten out of ten.
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?
Provides recommendations regarding how cost and consumption can be adjusted, but the reporting and analytic capabilities are very limited
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution primarily to look at Azure consumption data for our clients.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for roughly two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten. We haven’t had any usability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price depends on the actual Azure consumption and what we feed into it. The cost is on par with other providers.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
CloudBolt seems to have better reporting. It has a lot more flexibility in reporting. The support is so far better than what CloudCheckr offers.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I rate the tool a six out of ten.
Good tool for compliance check
What do you like best about the product?
It is a good end to end tool cloud management tool. Mostly used for cost control and security reason. Good tool and easy to use as well.
What do you dislike about the product?
I haven't seen any downside. May be there could be more features like added. There is a lot of potential for improvement and may be integration can be introduced as well.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It is very good for compliance and end to end cloud management. It has helped with the compliance of my application
Syncing files across devices made easy.
What do you like best about the product?
I really like that I could sync my files from my mobile phone to my laptop using CloudChecker CMx. It is not that costly as well compared to its competitors.
What do you dislike about the product?
The area that needs improvement is its navigation though. Not that user friendly if you are still new to it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Mostly management of files and accessing them across devices as well as providing storage.
Simple, elegant and cost deductive
What do you like best about the product?
CloudCheckr CMx is a good platform the resource are really optimistic and the cost is better and is better comparatively in the market which is secure also compliance
What do you dislike about the product?
The UI UX could have been better and sometimes the process is slow compared to the time management and could be better in navigation, and it is not always easy to use
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CloudCheckr it gathers Microsoft Azure and public cloud insights in one platform and the IaaS management, the dashboard alerts are really helpful and helps in multi cloud infrastructure
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)
Cloud Managment
What do you like best about the product?
The user interface is the best and offers many features that support and helps in monitoring cloud consumption and resource allocation, etc.
It does have alerts systems, you can schedule alters for consumption daily or weekly, or monthly, and you can also receive notifications for health improvement of your Azure Environment.
What do you dislike about the product?
The alerts give a delay for 3 days consumption.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The user interface is the best and offers many features that support and helps in monitoring cloud consumption and resource allocation, etc.
It does have alerts systems, you can schedule alters for consumption daily or weekly, or monthly, and you can also receive notifications for health improvement of your Azure Environment.
Very good product for understanding cloud cost
What do you like best about the product?
Works well with mainly AWS and has too many options to look into.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes gets difficult to find things we need.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Understanding cloud cost
An advanced system to keep our systems safe. !!
What do you like best about the product?
We feel safe when we publish our campaigns since its functions are constantly evaluating the risks to which we are prone and do not allow us to face them, through its tools we manage security and regulatory compliance so that no terms or any threat leaks out. For its part, the visualization panel is powerful when we need to manage and optimize our cloud, giving us total visibility, which saves effort and money from even the most complex cloud infrastructure. In general, it does not help protect, manage and control the most sensitive environments of the entire business system.
What do you dislike about the product?
The implementation of much more detailed training and certification is lacking, in turn, it offers so many options that any newbie to handling these tools may feel a bit lost, but training, documentation and an excellent support team are there. available, so there is no need to worry, and for this reason and many more it is one of the best software on the market.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are more productive in terms of revenue, we achieve this by using tools that allow us to quickly optimize business spending in the cloud mainly, being able to eliminate all waste by forcing compliance with regulations in the cloud, even optimizing growth of practice in it. The visibility is 360º throughout the web, protecting us by monitoring the continuous activity in it, making a detailed report with the information while the necessary regulations are met.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It is a powerful tool for any company since CloudCheckr continuously monitors, analyzes and reports on each resource in the cloud and in its environment, allowing to identify and eliminate every money wasted in spending in the cloud. Allowing to save a large percentage or more by requesting a Cloud Check report. Managed services are nourished by its tools to increase margins, increase billing accuracy, reduce invoice processing time and provide recommendations that increase the recovery of your professional services, certainly this software is totally designed for the growth of the practice in the cloud.
