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)
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.
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)
Making AWS EC2 Spot Instances a Breeze
What do you like best about the product?
Algorithmic choosing of spot instance types by price using scores.
What do you dislike about the product?
Would be nice to have a single node group that can do x86 and arm64 without changing AMI
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
AutoScaling EC2s based on application demands. Makes management and scaling easy to use and saves a lot of money that is measurable and predictable
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
ocean is the future
What do you like best about the product?
Being able to manage the containerized workloads using a single UI that includes all the necessary information.
What do you dislike about the product?
The need to add nodeSelectors in order to use correctly the VNG feature
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
being able to save money with great automation of the recovery process for spots instances that are taken back to the cloud provider
honest Spot Ocean review
What do you like best about the product?
Easy of multi operation system use within a clustered configuration, great convenience
What do you dislike about the product?
manual work, configurations, and repeated manual steps
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
lower costs mainly and added efficiency
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Dive in and have fun
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
