Apptio Cloudability Reviews

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.

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 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  ;-)

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. 

In my previous company, we used Cloudability for a lot of purposes, including reports related to cloud costs and reports based on resources. The solution was also useful for driving through the management groups to find what the cost is for each account, so the main use of Cloudability was related to costs and tagging purposes. In my previous company, we used to check if the resources were tagged so that they would appear in Cloudability, which helped us with the creation of the cost reports accurately.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to create reports and dashboards. Users can create dashboards in Cloudability by resource groups and accounts, which is very useful, especially considering its tagging features. Using tags in Cloudability, a user could create a report and dashboard if there was one account, and in that, there are multiple teams.

I don't exactly remember the problem with Cloudability. I can say that in my previous company, we could not efficiently make appropriate changes to the tags or resources in Cloudability, so we had to go for another solution, the name of which I can't remember, to help us get the aforementioned functionality. There was an area related to some cost implications that we couldn't work on with Cloudability in my previous company. In general, I feel Cloudability wasn't able to support many resources.

I have been using Cloudability for a year. I am a customer of the product.

I have never seen any stability issues with Cloudability. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven and a half out of ten.

There are many features that Cloudability does not support. If I look at a tool like Azure Resource Health, which I know offers a dashboard for cost analysis since I currently work with Azure, I see that it offers a wide range of features. The area related to security is not supported in Cloudability, but I am not sure if it was later deployed or not. Another problem with Cloudability stemmed from the fact that in my previous company, we had to deploy multiple things or features in the product by ourselves. There should be some room in Cloudability for the support of resources, indicating how many resource types it supports. Another area of concern in Cloudability is related to its ability to directly trigger action since its users couldn't directly trigger actions from Cloudability, though I am unsure if the latest version of the tool has that feature.

Only eight to ten people in my previous organization were using Cloudability, and later, we tried to get everyone in the company to use it. When we saw that we had to share the product's links and passwords with multiple users in my previous company, we decided that only the cloud governance team and managers should use Cloudability.

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

There are multiple features coming up in the dashboards provided by Azure for cost analysis. People can also consider other options like CloudHealth and CloudZero. I think that some features related to security are missing in Cloudability.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We use the product to get a detailed level of transparency on the cloud strengths.

Cloudability needs to focus on more cloud providers. 

I rate the tool's stability a seven out of ten. 

I rate Cloudability's scalability a seven out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is easy and doesn't take much time. I rate it an eight out of ten. It takes two months to complete the deployment. 

I rate the product a seven out of ten. It gives you granular details. 

We are just using it for Azure and Google, as we might have different Cloud vendors and what we're trying to do here is right-sizing so that it can send us reports for all the subscriptions, for example, in Azure. We'd like it to tag the information and all the costs related to the information. That way, we can do the right sizing report from there, and we can rate it. 

The solution has definitely improved our organization and how it functions.

What it does is it will give us a brief report. In two weeks and for subscriptions, we can see, okay how much the cost has been increasing, and we can limit it there. We can check it and we can find out who has put up more VMs or who has spun up their sources and who is doing what. We can make a report and we can check with them if they're really using it or not. We can send the reports and if the chargeback is missing, we can highlight that also and we can correct it. Therefore, it can give us some detailed information about our business that we can go through.

We're able to see reports that can show us areas where compute costs can be lowered, where we're wasting money, etc. It gives us great visibility across our teams and processes. 

We need to do the costs and we need to do the chargeback to different departments. On the Cloud, that is a challenge right now as either way you divide the subscription or you create the resource groups, it's hard. It doesn't matter which model you go with. We need to do the chargeback to different teams. 

If somebody is using, say, a database that might be hosted on to some other team, we should be able to do the chargeback based on that. It covers the different business mappings that we have to do and collects the data. There might be some managed and unmanaged subscriptions also. We need to distinguish between that and do the chargeback accordingly. This solution helps with that process.

The pricing isn't too expensive.

The only problem with Cloudability we are running is, we have the consultants here who implemented and now their contract is going to end. It already actually ended in December. They are rolling out the knowledge transfer to our teams internally. The way they did it, we are involved now, and it's more like manual work, which we don't like. Cloudability is an external tool, a third-party tool. We would like it to work as a connection to Azure itself and get all the data.

Right now, what we're doing is we are manually putting the data in it, which is something which we don't like about Cloudability. When we talked to the consultant himself, he said, "It's due to how our company's way of working and doing the chargeback." It's complicated and we have to do this manual process. That's the only reason, I was looking for other options. There might be a tool that can provide everything without doing manual work.

I'm not sure if any features are missing per se as we are just really starting to use the solution and we need to dig in deeper to take in all of its functionality.

We've only recently begun to work with the solution. It's been about four or five months at this point. It hasn't even been a year just yet. We're still currently rolling it out.

We just recently started using it and it's not widely used or open to our organization just yet. It's still in, I would say, a phase where we're testing. It's not in production yet, and therefore we haven't faced any bugs yet.

The solution is still relatively new to us, and, as we've only really started to implement it, we have not tried to scale it just yet. Therefore, I can't speak to its scalability just yet.

There might be 15 to 20 users so far right now. However, this number will increase. We are still in the initial phase. It's only the direct people, our admins, who are trying to make this work or try to make sense of it. Then we can lend it to the users. However, the access control is easy. You can give out admin access or user access to the reports.

I was in touch with technical support when we accidentally dropped all the business mappings. That's when we discovered, there are no backups being done on the application side. We connected with Cloudability, and they were able to provide us with JSON of the backup from one day back. That worked for us as there were not many changes, as per the functionality. Therefore, we were able to restore it from the JSON scripts.

I would rate them overall at a five or six. The thing is, I still have to work with them to make sure it's backed up daily. Right now, we are thinking to do it quarterly or monthly. However, at the speed that we are doing everything, the data might change frequently. If we wait that long, it's possible we might lose data. We can do other things also, behind the scenes, and in between, we can do staging, etc., and then we can record our steps.

Still, that's something we need to connect with them on in order to properly connect the dots, maybe. It should be backed up daily. Other than that, their response was quick, however, we just have to work on these technical details. It might be pending on our side. Maybe the person who might be working with them overlooked this thing.

We're currently looking into other options as this solution is too manual. We need something much more automated.

We might be using the Azure Cost Management only, however, with Cloudability, we can use multiple clouds. It's for Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud also, as we have footprints on all of those. That is the only reason we're using Cloudability. With it, you can see the cost management in one tool, instead of using three different tools for each different cloud.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's a bit complex. It's not straightforward as the data which we are getting from Azure doesn't make any sense. Right now, what we're doing is, we are getting all this tag information, subscription information, as we're getting it in a CSV and then putting in a database and then creating a JSON and then loading it to the API's. 

It's a manual process. That's the only thing I don't like about it. We have to go through the process and see if maybe something has not been done right. We have hired a third-party consultant to implement it and rebuild it all now, so that's something we are going to go through and see. Maybe it's not done right. Maybe there is another way around it. We'll have to figure out what happened with the initial implementation and see if we can streamline it to make it easier to use.

We used consultants that are only starting to hand over the solution to our team now. They finished their portion of the work in December. We would have preferred to be more involved as it's only just now that we've realized how manual the solution actually is, and how little we can automate based on our company.

The pricing is okay. It's not too expensive. That said, I'm not completely familiar with the licensing model.

We're just customers. We aren't partners of Cloudability.

We're using the latest version of the solution, as far as I know.

We're still in the initial phase, however, we're finding, overall that it works well. If you're looking into multi-cloud functionality, definitely go for it. If you're sticking with the one cloud, for example, if your organization is just using Azure, it may be better to use a tool dedicated to that. Cloudability would also work fine in that instance, however. If your organization isn't too complex, you may be able to piece together everything with what's there.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.

The reason is mainly due to my own limited knowledge or exposure to the product so far. As I said, the process is manual. I don't have a tool for it. It is maybe how we've addressed it so far. Once we dig deep into it, we'll come to know a bit more about if maybe Cloudability can grab the data directly from Azure. We need not move beyond this manual processing. Maybe the reason is due to the complexity of our own organization. Once that is addressed, the tool is going to work really well.

Our client wanted a transparent and visible view of financials in the cloud and that's why we opted for Cloudability Optimization Platform. We are using the solution on AWS.

One of our clients has used Cloudability to get help with rising monthly costs and promote accountability and awareness of cloud spend throughout the different areas of the business. Teams were virtually clueless about how much it was costing to test and develop their respective products. With Cloudability everything is there to see so things can be managed efficiently, saving money and resources.

Transparency and visibility are the key features.

Regarding integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment, it fits in naturally and enhances the overall value as it's "native" to AWS.

We are also able to export data from it and put it in Excel sheets for some of the reporting.

More documentation with more use case scenarios would be nice. Also, the dashboard needs to include more graphs per team to show what individual teams are spending in a given time period.

It's quite mature and stable. We did extensive testing before putting it into production.

As it's in the cloud, scalability is not an issue at all. The environment consists of dozens of VMs.

It justifies the cost and is worth it.

We loved the experience of purchasing this solution through AWS Marketplace. It's very intuitive and cost-efficient. We bought it there because that's where it's available.

I rate it a nine out of ten, as it provides a holistic view of financials and is an enabling technology.

We mostly use it to see stack utilization. Corporate uses it for its break down of teams, who is being charged what, but there are a lot of holes in this. 

For the most part, it is used to determine if the machine is using the rightsizing, etc.

The sizing recommendation will look, and say, "You are only using this at 80%," then recommend a better fit for you.

The sizing recommendations should be done in longer than two week windows. They should be looking at a whole year's worth of information because we get spikes, and once you are out of that window, it doesn't account for it. It will say that you can save money, but the reality is that it wasn't estimated with a longer running cycle and time slice. Also, if you were able to have a year long look at it, then it would be able to do some type of a linear regression model along with some predictive analytics, and say, "You spent this much this year, so we estimate with your growth rate that this is where you will need to be next year without any new features. Right now, I don't think that they do good predictions at all. Some of their competitor's do offer these predictions, so this is an area for improvement.

Therefore, we would like them to have a linear regression, so we can be predictive for budgets, allocations, and the year's follow ups. We also want to have a longer window of analytics with better certainty that our workload will fit the model, not just in a two week window.

With containers, corporate doesn't look at a container level to charge adequately, because things get masked. 

The stability is average. Everybody knows when it is down, which is a good thing.

The scalability is average. It is not terrible, but it is not great. Sometimes things take a while to load, but any analytics that haven't ran in a while need to reboot all their stuff.

We are very big. I don't even know how many EC2 types that we have. As an example, they want us to save $12 million USD a year on budget, and I don't even know what that computes to in compute power.

I have not used technical support.

I was not involved in the integration and configuration of the product.

My team is one of the most expensive teams, and we look at it quite a bit. We have probably easily saved around $400,000 USD a year.

The product is probably not valuable until you are over a certain threshold in compute power. While I don't know what the actual cost is, if you were to say, "We could save you X amount and that would offset the cost of their product, then it is probably starting to be in the realm of being worth it."

We only use the AWS version.

• Cost optimization
• Billing reports

Our clients are now able to get a better insight into their AWS accounts. In this case, they get their own view and can control who has access to that view themselves. It is self-service. It has also given us some capability to do some automation around it during configuration. Therefore, we don't have to manually go and add accounts.

The ability to generate different types of dashboards and being able to make those dashboards available to customers (our users). So each user can have their own dashboard that they want to consume. Instead of having to share one dashboard for multiple users, you can create individual views for each user to view, and that view will contain only their own accounts, which allows for separation of data.

The API is not well-documented. It is not straightforward and difficult to use. This needs to be improved, as it is very difficult for our developers to develop automation around it.

They need to improve their billing data. It seems that sometimes it is not accurate. We have had customers complain that the data they see on the AWS billing dashboard is not reflected (or is very different) from the data that they see in the product. So, there is some discrepancy in the billing reports. I don't know why, but that is one complaint that we see.

Stability is fine. It can handle the reports.

We have hundreds upon hundreds of accounts, and it is able to handle that. 

We don't have any performance issues. Its scalability is fine. I don't have an issue with it.

The technical support is terrible. You can't pick up the phone and talk to somebody. They don't have online chat support. Everything is by email, which is not good.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS was pretty straightforward. AWS has provided their partners with a better way to integrate within their environment. I don't see any issues with it. All you have to do is create an IAM role with a trust policy, and it works.

We also considered Cloud Help. We did not choose it because it was expensive and some of the features that came with it were not what we needed.

We chose Cloudability because of the cost. Another reason was because it supported multiple cloud providers. Based on our evaluation, we also realized that it was easy for our users to consume it and login, because it is integrated it with an identity provider Active Directory. It has single sign-on to our directory.

It is a standalone product, but it does integrate for identity with our other directory. This is pretty straightforward, and it works.

AWS doesn't have a version of this product. Cloudability is a billing and reporting tool. AWS does have capability to provide billing data, but the report and analytics portion of it is not provided by AWS. AWS just provides the data and cloud ability to ingest the data and do the reports.

If you are heavy on automation, then this might not be a good product because the API is not very well-documented. If you need accuracy in your data at the moment, there is some discrepancy in the billing data. So, you should factor that into in your decision.