Gained clearer financial governance and have improved cloud cost visibility and forecasting
What is our primary use case?
The main use case for using Umbrella in our organization is to gain a good setup and obtain visibility over the cloud in financial management. It helps us in a transparent manner where we can see intuitive dashboards and self-service reporting that connects us in minutes and delivers unified cost data within 24 hours, making it very accessible for our FinOps and engineering teams. We are using it for AI insights where AI-driven anomaly detection and customizable alerts reduce manual analysis and effort. Some technical users in our organization use it for navigation purposes.
We use Umbrella for FinOps and cost allocation in the organization, which helps us track spend by business unit, customer, feature, or Kubernetes namespace. This helps us reduce costs and achieve maximum benefit. It also helps us with forecasting and budgeting of the projects we work on. It generates good demand forecasts from the CUR data set, sets budgets, and exports dashboards for executive reviews.
What is most valuable?
The most important aspect for me is FinOps and cost allocation, which helps us track spends by business unit, customers, features, or Kubernetes namespace, which helps us save on costs and generate revenue metrics for accountability and transparency.
In terms of features, the multi-cloud SaaS unification for AWS has helped us unify dashboards with tagging and cost explorers, which also helped us with EKS breakdowns. That is something which we admire the most.
AI detection and recommendation has definitely helped us and reduced over 90 waste categories, which included idle resources, overprovisioning, project impacting, and project saving. It has also helped us with real-time alerts and root cause analysis.
It has helped connect accounts with onboarding time increased by 98%, which is a very significant number. Apart from that, it has helped in monitoring and the alerting system using AI baseline usage. It flagged anomalies and required steps and decreased anomalies by 89%. It has also optimized over 60 recommendations by saving impact and tracking implementation, and increased optimization and inspection of financials by 33%. It has helped us in better reporting and forecasting by custom dashboards, which track cost outcomes and forecast budgets. It has increased our efficiency by 99%, which is again a significant number, and also helped us in forecasting and better budgeting. Budgeting has been improved by 10% to 15%.
We have seen that collaboration was increased due to clear data being reported to the engineering, finance, and business teams. This ensures better collaboration and transparency. Collaboration between teams has increased by 33%. Transparency is provided using intuitive dashboards. It has also helped us obtain proper monitoring and alerts, which has helped in saving by flagging anomalies and preventing any losses we may incur later.
What needs improvement?
I do not feel that anything needs to be changed. Umbrella is solving the purpose and is on point. The UI is intuitive and user-friendly. The learning curve is very easy. The features provided are on point. There is no downtime or challenges, and it is easy to learn and easy to use. In total, I do not feel that improvement is needed as per our organizational use case. Maybe for other organizations, they might have some suggestions, but for our organization specifically, I do not feel that they are lacking somewhere. It is already providing us the best thing.
Almost everything is working as we expect. Small things we do not always point out. I feel that it works well and we do not have such problems with them specifically.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field for almost 10 plus years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Umbrella is definitely a scalable and stable solution. We did not face any downtime or reliability issues so far.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Umbrella has definitely handled our organizational growth perfectly. It is definitely a good scalable solution.
How are customer service and support?
We had contact with them just three weeks back regarding technical deployment within the cloud. They resolved the concern within an hour. That was a great thing, so I would rate that as 10 out of 10.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use any previous solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment was really good. Umbrella's technical support and product specialist team handled it really well. They completed the initial deployment within just a day in our organization.
It is a streamlined experience by the AWS marketplace. It was done with a five-click integration with minimal IAM permissions. We have connected accounts, and it has given us a good connection to AWS billing. Data ingestion was done within 24 hours. It has also given us customized dashboards within a day.
What about the implementation team?
The integrations are pretty smooth. We did not face any issues. Integrations are smooth and sleek. It is also solving the purpose, which means no problems at all.
What was our ROI?
We have gotten Umbrella for the purpose why we got it. We feel that it has contributed directly towards the business, finance, and engineering teams and the betterment of the teams. We have seen a significant return on investment, which I mentioned earlier in the data. If we are getting good results, there is no reason to give it a low rating. As per me, it is a great solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The procurement process was very easy. We have purchased Umbrella from the AWS marketplace, and it was a streamlined process. The procurement and billing process is easy, and there are no challenges.
The metering and billing experience has been really transparent as we got it through the AWS marketplace subscription. It has helped us choose from a procurement workflow where we have seen monthly and annual plans. We first used it and evaluated how it fit with the organization. After we reached a conclusion, we opted for the annual plan because that was giving us maximum savings. That is something which is again very transparent, and the cost compared to other solutions is really cheap. I can say proudly that I am a proud Umbrella user.
The pricing and setup licensing were very transparent. The AWS marketplace mentioned everything very clearly, and later on, there were no challenges or surprises in the cost specifically, which makes the whole process very transparent and trusted. As the AWS marketplace is with us, that ensures that whatever we are doing is a very transparent thing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other options which included Ternary, Anops, Cloudability, and Finout. These are some of the platforms which we evaluated. But we felt that Umbrella is better than them. That is why we chose Umbrella over them.
What other advice do I have?
Anyone who is looking for a dedicated FinOps and AI anomaly detection and forecasting platform, which is good with transparent and clear costs and is also cheap compared to other solutions, can definitely give Umbrella a try. It is one of the best solutions which we have used so far. I would rate this solution as a five out of five.
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)
AI-Powered Cost Optimization Makes Cloud Savings Effortless
What do you like best about the product?
AI-Powered Cost Optimization helps pinpoint unnecessary cloud spending and offers practical suggestions to reduce costs across various multi-cloud platforms, Kubernetes pods, and SaaS tools. It makes it easier to manage and optimize expenses in complex cloud environments.
What do you dislike about the product?
The platform is missing advanced features for role-based permissions, templating, and governance. This limitation may pose challenges for larger organizations that require detailed and granular access control.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Delayed Issue Detection
Without automated anomaly detection, issues like revenue drops or system failures may go unnoticed until they cause major damage.
Solution: Real-time alerts allow teams to act immediately, reducing downtime and revenue loss.
Fast Problem Detection, But Alert Overload Needs Tweaking
What do you like best about the product?
I like that Anodot spots problems in the data fast and lets me know right away—it saves a lot of time and stress.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes it sends too many alerts, and it takes a bit to adjust everything the way I want.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
it's helps me catch issues and changes in data early, so I can fix things quickly and keep everything running smoothly.
Great tool to monitor issues arising in production
What do you like best about the product?
It provided us with critical alerts like candidate login failures, application completion failures and crm issue allowing us to pinpoint the core issues and solving them in very less time
What do you dislike about the product?
It was a little confusing for the non technical product managers to use and lacks proper role based accessing
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It provided us the data of our end user customer interaction ( the candidates ), allowing us to find out where we could improve and increase the in flow of candidate.
It also allowed us to handle the crm issue and providing a seamless experience to our backend clients
A good cloud cost visualization tool
What do you like best about the product?
Anodot Cost provides real-time visibility into cloud costs, usage, and performance. This allows organizations to identify and eliminate cost anomalies as they happen. Anodot Cost uses machine learning to identify and predict cost anomalies. This allows organizations to take proactive steps to reduce costs. Anodot Cost is cloud agnostic, so it can be used to monitor costs from any cloud provider
What do you dislike about the product?
The main thing I dislike about Anodot Cost is the pricing. It is a subscription-based service, and the pricing can be expensive for some organizations. Additionally, Anodot Cost requires access to cloud billing data, which may not be available for all organizations.
In addition, the user interface can be a bit clunky and the documentation is not always clear and concise
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anodot Cost is solving a number of problems for organizations that use cloud computing. These problems include:
- Uncontrolled cloud costs: Cloud computing can be very expensive, and it can be difficult to keep track of costs. Anodot Cost can help organizations track costs and identify areas where costs can be reduced.
- Inefficient cloud usage: Organizations often use more cloud resources than they need. Anodot Cost can help organizations identify unused resources and optimize their cloud usage.
- Lack of visibility into cloud costs and usage: It can be difficult to get a clear picture of cloud costs and usage. Anodot Cost provides real-time visibility into cloud costs, usage, and performance.
Anodot Cost is benefiting me by helping me to reduce my cloud costs, optimize my cloud usage, and gain better visibility into my cloud costs and usage. I have been able to save a significant amount of money on my cloud costs by using Anodot Cost. I have also been able to improve the efficiency of my cloud usage by using Anodot Cost. I have also been able to get a better understanding of my cloud costs and usage by using Anodot Cost.
Anodot Pileus is very useful and easy to use
What do you like best about the product?
K8s dashboard is one of my favorites, it very useful integrated with the AWS environment dashboard.
What do you dislike about the product?
I dislike the permissions model and how I need consently update api-key header devision instead of add parameter of the customer while using the API.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anodot saving a lot of trouble understand what you pay for with very simple and sraight forward way
FinOps In Mind Execution by using Anodot costs
What do you like best about the product?
For FinOps, we're working with Anodot cost. This tool provides multi-cloud cost & usage BI and also identifies the required actions in order to reduce costs and implement operations best practices.
Each account owner has visibility on the cloud costs posture and required FinOps recommended actions.
The tool is easy to use and part of new account onboarding
What do you dislike about the product?
The cloud operation world is running very fast, Anodot cost need to be one step ahead with the latest direct and indirect costs recommendation.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
One holistic view of Finops cost and usage/recommendation.
To-do list of account owners
Anomaly detection and overall budget manamgment
Time in the cloud is money, with Anodot we are saving a lot of money!!!
What do you like best about the product?
The intuitive UI makes the work a really simple tool to work with.
Anodot produces a valuable insight that brings us value immediately, we've managed to save a lot of money thanks to Anodot.
What do you dislike about the product?
Anodot should improve their support of the Kubernetes agent, having said that we know that a new agent should be released soon, fixing these issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Managing costs of cloud providers isn't a trivial task, the existing tools aren't comprehensive enough.
The best Finops application
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use, so simple everyone in the company can quickly learn to use it and save money instantly.
The support and interaction of Anodot team is exceptional.
It brought true value to our company!
What do you dislike about the product?
Integration to other services like Datadog usage
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The ability to manage and track AWS spending and identify AWS wastes. The granularity of the visibility is awesome, zooming in to the instance and K8S clusters level.
The above with the ability to manage tags, budget and alerts and align the cost to different business units brings the waste to the attention of the specific teams and by that saves money.
Excellent tool, easy to work with and very effective
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of building dashboards, Make cuts and crosses between resources and know how much everything costs together
What do you dislike about the product?
Sharing dashboards is currently not possible if it wasn't me who built it
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I can know the costs of the resource I consume in an easy and understandable way
