IBM Cloudability

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.

We used Cloudability  for cloud cost and usage management. It normalized data and gave us custom cost metrics that enhanced the dashboards and reports to answer the real questions we needed to answer to run the FinOps practice.

The reporting and analytics section of Cloudability helped us with cost optimization by allowing "drill down" quickly, identifying anomalies, and monitoring usage patterns.  I accessed the system (as did others) daily to answer questions and make informed decisions. I frequently used the top rightsizing recommendations and monitored them continuously, sharing relevant information with the engineering teams for action.

The most crucial feature in reducing our cloud costs via engineering efforts was the rightsizing recommendations.  For commitment discount tracking,  the dashboards we created for reserved instance and savings plan coverage and utilization were key to showing ROI. As for Cloudability's integration with AWS , it refreshed the data as often as AWS  wrote to the billing files (a couple of times per day), along with pulling usage data from CloudWatch.

I wish there had been a way to temporarily remove certain recommendations from the list for teams that couldn't implement them immediately.  Cloudability could have offered more automation functionality and enhanced the cost allocation modeling, although I understand it is there now!

I used Cloudability from 2018 - 2023, and then transferred to another company.

Stability was also top-notch with only few issues.

Scalability was excellent, and I never experienced issues.

I found their services support team to be extremely helpful and responsive, providing valuable assistance when needed. Their regular support team's response time was generally within a few hours. I also had regularly scheduled meetings with the additionally funded professional services team each week to address any questions and set strategies, since I did not have FinOps staff of my own.

Positive

I was a customer and hadn't used another solution before Cloudability.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment was quick.  Updates were seamless.

The vendor did it, with some input from our team.

The ROI was 9x.  The cost avoidance over the span of the last year was nine times what it cost to have the license to the product plus FinOps staff salaries and a few engineers part-time.  We documented both engineering efforts and the commitment discount efforts for 3 years, and each year, the ROI increased.

Setup was easy, and updates seamless.  Pricing is straightforward.  

I have recommended Cloudability to others, as it played a significant role in my success as a FinOps practitioner. Although Cloudability may be one of the higher-priced options, it's worth the investment. Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.  It would get a ten if it would have let me choose my graph colors  ;-)

What I really like is the centralized dashboard, and that we can customize it according to the customer's needs. The support from IBM is also fantastic.

They can improve the custom range of the network. Now they have just a one-year dashboard. 

I have been using Cloudability for the past 7 months. 

The stability is being improved. 

The scalability is good. 

They are helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward. You can use the APIs and you can connect to your cloud to the cloud availability. It's very easy. There is no market time. We can be accessed. You have the script that will generate on API. It will be integrated to the cloud with our infrastructure. I believe we get the reliability immediately. 

We have done the POP for the multiple products as well. We used Postgres, and then NetApp. But we found that this is the best product because other companies have some limitations, such as cloud availability. So that is why we choose this product instead of other products.

I rate the overall solution a 9 out of 10. 

We use the product to see the cloud costs. It helps our business, financial, and technology teams. 

Cloudability has given us more visibility and insights that guide our decisions. 

The tool helps us to resize on AWS correctly. 

Cloudability needs to improve on data collection from cloud sources. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

I rate Cloudability's stability an eight out of ten. 

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

The tool's deployment is easy and has documentation. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. We saved 20 percent on our budget because of its actions. 

Cloudability is a bit expensive. 

You need to maintain contact with the company so they can guide you on using the product. I rate it a nine out of ten.