What needs improvement with Cloudability?

I find that Apptio Cloudability is one of those things where I just poke around until I have what I am looking for. I would not say it is the most user-friendly system; there is a lot to it, so it can take some getting used to. Although it has a great UI, you just have to really understand what the different filters mean. There are a lot of filters based on usage, cost, vendor, and many different things, and it is a lot to take in. It takes some time to figure out what you are trying to do. I do not bother some of my more senior teammates who have more experience with it just because I am trying to learn it through doing, or I have been in the last year as I have gotten on the team. Apptio Cloudability is a powerful tool, and I am more of a novice with it, so I would not want to suggest anything. I am not a super user of Apptio Cloudability.

Apptio Cloudability can be improved as the range of optimization opportunities for Google is very limited in comparison to competitors in the market. Additionally, the fact that Alibaba Cloud is not incorporated in the tool has meant that I have had to create a Power BI ecosystem outside in order to get the total TCO view for all my cloud providers. Other improvements needed for Apptio Cloudability include the ability to forecast down at the SKU or at least at the service level, which would be quite useful to have. Additionally, more visibility around input, output, cash token usage would be very important on the AI side, as would more visibility around egress costs and retry costs. Apptio Cloudability needs to evolve and develop much faster in comparison to competitors in the market. On the Google side, numerous other vendors have three to four, if not five, different optimization tactics, but within Apptio Cloudability, there are only two, and even the native console at Google has more optimization tactics. The cadence and speed of development must improve on a tool such as Apptio Cloudability, especially as AI usage and AI capabilities increase.

I think Apptio Cloudability is a really very good platform for costing. I do understand it can be cost-prohibitive to buy the license to use Apptio Cloudability because of the way it charges. If you are not a big enough company, I can understand that. Apptio Cloudability might want to look at costing models for smaller businesses that cannot afford Apptio Cloudability or Apptio Cloudability Premium. I believe Premium is about one hundred thousand dollars or so in US dollars, and Apptio Cloudability I believe is a little bit less than that. However, there are small businesses out there that will not be able to afford either option. I wonder if that is a market to target, to look at a smaller model of Apptio Cloudability or at least a smaller costing model that could help those businesses as well. The other thing is that there are just a few anomalies inside Apptio Cloudability that I think can definitely be improved. It seems a really small thing, but when you are using it, it can actually be quite a big thing. Since Turbonomic has been integrated with Apptio Cloudability, as good as that is to be able to get those different costing figures and larger savings, it does not give the ability to have an instant Jira ticket integration with the Turbonomic costings or the advanced costing, if you would call it, inside Apptio Cloudability Premium. In the basic costings, you can use Jira and you can open up a Jira ticket and you can have all this information straight from Apptio Cloudability straight in the Jira ticket, assign it to someone, and then someone is working on it. You cannot do that in Turbonomic at the moment. I am not really sure why. Obviously, there is some sort of development issue behind the scenes, I imagine, with the way that Turbonomic works compared to the basic costing. It would be a huge advantage to be able to do that, to just open a Jira ticket, have someone assigned to it, and then proceed forward. I definitely think they should look at that.

The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using. IBM, the company that runs Cloudability, released the Groups feature back in the summer of 2025. While Groups can be used in some parts of the tool, it can't be used across the entire tool. I've found that Groups is basically unusable because if it can't be used everywhere, you would have to run both group-based access control and direct user-based access control at the same time, which doesn't make any sense. The Groups feature has improved over time, but it's still not something we feel we can use on an everyday basis, so the IAM section remains an issue right now. Most of the tool is very well-functioning and developed, and that's the only real improvement area that we've seen.

It would be beneficial if we could use resource tags to provide more fine-grained visibility.

At this moment, I don't have specific opinions on how Cloudability could be improved or enhanced. I'm using it as a major source of information for my team, but I'm not the right person to suggest enhancements. I believe that automating all manual processes in Cloudability would be beneficial, providing a proactive prescriptive analysis on what needs to be done to lower costs; however, this might also keep us out of business. Enhancements could be made in the user interface and customization, and leveraging GenAI would be an area for improvement in Cloudability.

The first one is, how to help users, especially practitioners, stick to their commitment plan. For example, how can I use Cloudability to help me optimize my selling plan and my residential plan? The second feature I'd like to see is a combination of cost visualization and a sustainability approach. I want to see how much cost I consume in the cloud and what my CO2 footprint is. So, cost visualization and a sustainability approach are the two things I would like. I would improve the integration, or the preparation of the integration, for a complex environment. I think that we usually assume, "Well, this is easy to integrate." In a very complex optimization, this can become very complex. This is where I think we need to be much more prepared, with up-to-date points, to evaluate the complexity of the landing zone or the account to connect. We also need to make sure that we put all the requirements in front of the customer to make sure that we don't fail in the integration.

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 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!

Cloudability needs to improve on data collection from cloud sources.

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.

Cloudability needs to focus on more cloud providers.

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.

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.

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 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.

There is always room for improvement in education and training. We are not that mature in terms of our automation. It could help us identify where we could optimize in terms of build.

Cloudability needs to be simplified a bit. It can be quite difficult and daunting when some of my colleagues login for the first time. It is difficult to get their particular reports or dashboards set up. It would be interesting if they sort of expanded their rightsizing model. It's doing a good job at the moment, but it doesn't necessarily take into account a lot of edge cases. Thus, if they spent more time on the development of the rightsizing, it would be quite useful.