What is our primary use case?
In my company, we are overall on your Azure, so we have our own Microsoft Azure. Our organization has a deployment into Azure itself, and we have the entire process set up on Azure. We are also using different products from Microsoft. I think, basically, it has been my company's cloud investment for a very long time.
What is most valuable?
The most beneficial features for me are the tool's visualization capabilities, the way the reports are presented, and the fact that we can also implement our governance policies. I think we can create the budget in the tool for our company and look into the different best practices across different places, which are all pretty good for us. I think for sure that the team would be utilizing it for different purposes, but for me, at a leadership level, the visualization part is really good and helpful.
What needs improvement?
In our company, we recently started using the tool, so I don't know what options it provides to actually scale up. I think it is too soon to basically provide feedback about the tool. So far, Azure Cost Management has been helping our company with the accountability we need for our hosting costs and other cost management.
The maintenance of the product by Azure's support team is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Azure Cost Management for a year. My company has a partnership with Microsoft.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
My company started using the tool's services recently. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a pretty scalable solution, which is one of the reasons my company decided to go for Azure. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.
Most of the people in my company are on Azure, and then we use it for our deployments, so our development team works on it. Around four to five people use Azure Cost Management.
How are customer service and support?
Microsoft's technical team responded that the maintenance schedule was random and not planned. The aforementioned area consists of my company's biggest challenges with the tool. We tried escalating our company issues with the tool's support team many times, but it has nothing to do with Azure Cost Management. It has good documentation support, but it is not that good in terms of technical support.
I rate the support a five out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
My DevOps team was taking care of the tool's deployment. I heard no complaints about the tool, and it was pretty good at anomaly detection as well. I think my company was getting good returns on cloud costs and other stuff from one place.
The solution is deployed on the public cloud.
I have no idea about the time it took to deploy the tool because a team handling its deployment process was assigned all the deployment-related tasks. I understand the value the tool brought to our company, as it helped us save on costs.
What was our ROI?
Overall, in terms of hosting costs, my company reduced costs by 10 to 15 percent, as per the last quarter's report. The aforementioned results are from when my company first implemented the tool, so I am sure if I talked to my DevOps department, it would be around the same range as mentioned. We are not a big organization, so we, either way, are not spending that much. So, somewhere in terms of value savings or cost savings, we are able to cut down by 15 percent.
The product has helped save costs for the company. I rate the ROI as a nine or ten out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
In terms of the benefits for our company's operations from the cost alerts provided by the tool, I would say that cloud optimization was just one of the initiatives that I took up as an engineering director. The tool might have different features, but I think one of its greatest things is its good documentation, which our company can implement very quickly.
I have not tried the tool's AI part so far because I think we are very specific with our AI policy in our company, so we haven't given any AI too much of a chance yet to actually contribute to the practices that we are doing, but I think it will happen in the future or next quarter.
Maintenance is mostly done automatically, but even if we require something, then there is a team that takes care of the regular maintenance and updates that we have to do.
I rate the tool as seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud