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.
