How to Optimize AWS Costs and Resources with CloudCheckr CMx

Tracking costs and resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be challenging. Although provisioning cloud resources in AWS is more cost-effective than managing a traditional data center, those monthly bills can spiral upwards if not managed properly.
Trying to control and optimize your AWS costs and resources? This is where effective cloud management comes into play.

CloudCheckr helps enterprises, managed service providers, and public sector organizations optimize AWS costs in a single pane of glass. The CloudCheckr CMx platform is built to deliver insights that help users optimize spending, manage and allocate costs, and ultimately save 30% or more on their monthly cloud bills.

We regularly ask our customers to describe their AWS pain points. Some of the top concerns we’ve heard revolve around issues such as:

1. Cost Visualization: Cloud users need a constantly updated, complete breakdown of their costs. However, the native tools in AWS do not always offer sufficient granularity. Users need alerts for cost anomalies to avoid unpleasant surprises when they receive the bill at the end of the month.
2. Spend Allocation: AWS users need to understand, allocate, and track the costs associated with their various tags. This information is essential for them to properly measure their efficiency and make informed business decisions. Furthermore, they need the information produced in an accurate and usable format instead of combing through disparate tools in their AWS environment to gather the data.
3. Inventory and Resource Tracking: Every business faces a competitive landscape, and inefficient or overspending puts companies at a disadvantage. Therefore, these organizations need to ensure that they are not wasting money through over-provisioning or poor purchasing habits. They need to ensure that their resources are provisioned correctly and that they can easily eliminate waste related to unused and idle resources. It’s also important to right size resources to meet the capacity required.

3 Solutions CloudCheckr Offers to Optimize AWS Costs and Resources

Here’s how the CloudCheckr has helped AWS users address all three of these cost and resource management issues — and what our customers have to say about the tools in our robust cloud management platform:

Issue 1: Cost Visualization

The essence of the first need is real-time visibility into costs. CloudCheckr delivers upon this through a combination of alerts, reports, and actionable recommendations. The cost savings reports and best practice checks in CloudCheckr CMx help users visualize current and projected costs and take appropriate actions to save on their AWS bills.

Users can set automated alerts and daily email summaries whenever spending crosses their own self-defined thresholds and metrics. When the user receives an alert or desires greater insight, they can then turn to the AWS cost reports in CloudCheckr CMx. These continuously updated reports provide complete cost transparency and allow a user to easily view all key daily and monthly cost statistics. The Summary reports also provide comparisons between current and past costs and predict future spend based upon current usage. When users want even more granularity for a particular issue, they can use custom cost reports and dashboards in CloudCheckr CMx.

CloudCheckr customers can use easily customizable alerts and reports in CloudCheckr CMx to gain complete visibility, immediately identify cost spikes, and avoid unpleasant end-of-the-month surprises. 

“I chose CloudCheckr because of the sheer level of transparency. Right up front, you’re given a list of things that you can do to modify or optimize your cloud infrastructure for considerable cost savings.”

Rick Garee, DevOps Manager, Devada

Issue 2: Spend Allocation

The second need reflects the common business requirement that individual units operate within their own budgets, take responsibility for their own costs, and track their own ROI. Businesses demand the capability to track this information through tagging. Although AWS permits tagging, it can sometimes be a confusing system using native tools only.

CloudCheckr users can build customizable Cost Allocation reports to efficiently capture, process, and provide this information. They are able to see exactly what they are spending on their tagged resources on a daily and monthly basis. With the AWS Advanced Grouping report, users can group project resources and track costs across services. For greater insight, CloudCheckr provides filtering options to quickly isolate specific costs, cost centers, and tags. As a result, users can identify entire projects’ costs along with each individual service portion.

The cost allocation reports in CloudCheckr CMx provide a clear view of how costs are being accrued across multiple resource tags. This enables users to efficiently assign costs to appropriate cost centers. CloudCheckr CMx also offers customizable dashboards to help users see their data in easy-to-understand and shareable format.

“Everything we do with CloudCheckr in our cost optimization program is automated, even down to invoicing. So at the end of the month instead of spending hours and hours generating invoices that are unique to every customer… it’s all built into the tool.”

Doug Heestand, Co-founder, Privo (now Navisite)

Issue 3: Inventory and Resource Tracking

The third need reflected the common customer concern around the sheer number of resources that AWS offers. With so many services and pricing models, users need to make sure that they’re making the most efficient choices when it comes to provisioning and purchasing.

CloudCheckr delivers utilization analytics and reports that help users eliminate waste and turn chaos into clarity. CloudCheckr users have access to the custom report builder to identify mis-provisioned resources. Following right sizing recommendations helps ensure that they have properly provisioned resources. Administrators can even leverage CloudCheckr’s automation to right size instances at the click of a button. Additionally, the Idle Instance report in CloudCheckr CMx, when used in tandem with the Best Practice cost alerts, helps users to promptly terminate unused resources.

Once users are confident in their right sizing, they can review Reserved Instance purchasing recommendations in CloudCheckr to model different purchasing choices and cost scenarios. With these individualized purchasing recommendations and other cost optimization best practices, CloudCheckr customers typically reduce their AWS bills by 30% or more.

“I ended up hitting closer to a 30% cut on our AWS spend, and that was directly related to being able to go into CloudCheckr and drilling into the different reports in the billing area.

Brent Bain, Lead Cloud Architect, Best Friends Animal Society

Achieving Total Cloud Visibility to Optimize AWS Costs and Resources

Looking for visibility into spend, alerts to ensure budgets are followed, cost tracking and allocation, and optimized resources? A cloud management platform can help. CloudCheckr CMx delivers reporting and alerts that facilitate the process. All of the essential information that is required to control and optimize all financial aspects of AWS performance is placed at users’ fingertips.

CloudCheckr CMx works for organizations — and cloud environments — of all sizes. Sign up for a free trial today.