The Need for Cloud Cost Monitoring

When organizations use cloud services, they often deal with multiple teams working on different projects across various environments. This setup can make it really tricky to keep track of how much is being spent and on what. As a result, cloud costs can start to creep up without clear oversight.

The saying "you can't manage what you can't measure" is especially true for cloud costs.

With cloud cost monitoring, companies get a detailed look at their cloud usage, allowing them to spot where they might be spending too much.

This visibility is the first step towards cloud cost optimization; basically making smarter choices about how to use cloud resources in a way that saves money without cutting back on what the business needs to succeed.

What is Cloud Cost Monitoring?

Cloud Cost Monitoring is a crucial strategy for businesses looking to optimize their investment in cloud infrastructure across platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Cloud monitoring functions via a combination of automated tools and manual checks. These tools and checks are designed to continuously oversee the operation of servers, networks, databases, and applications within a cloud environment.

Cloud Monitoring Tools record aspects such as cost spikes, underutilized resources, zombie instances,  resource consumption, and availability, sending out alerts when irregularities or deviations from set thresholds are identified.

How does Cloud Cost Monitoring Work?

Effective Cloud Cost Monitoring encompasses several key operational processes:

Data Collection from Logs

The process begins with comprehensive data collection, where usage and cost data are gathered from all cloud services. This step is fundamental as it ensures that every dollar spent is accounted for and analyzed.

Cloud Billing and Log Analytics

The collected data undergoes a rigorous analytical process, which helps identify patterns, trends, and anomalies. This stage is critical for recognizing opportunities to cut costs or reallocate resources more effectively.

Measures for Optimization

Following analysis, targeted actions are taken to optimize spending. This might include scaling down or scaling up resources, purchasing reserved instances, or renegotiating service contracts based on usage data.

5 Key Business Benefits of Cloud Data Monitoring & Reporting

Cloud monitoring offers a myriad of benefits to organizations, particularly those that heavily rely on cloud-based operations. Here are some key advantages:

1. Financial Clarity and Control: Offers a clear, comprehensive view of cloud expenditures, enabling better financial planning and budget management.
2. Operational Efficiency: Identifies inefficient resource allocations, allowing businesses to streamline operations and enhance performance without excessive spending.
3. Enhanced Forecasting Abilities: With precise data, companies can forecast future spending more accurately, aiding in long-term financial and strategic planning.
4. Strategic Resource Allocation: Ensures resources are utilized where they add the most value, supporting more informed strategic decisions.
5. Compliance and Risk Management: Helps maintain compliance with financial policies and reduces fiscal risks associated with cloud spending.

6 Ways to Monitor Cloud Costs in AWS, GCP, & Azure

Effective cloud monitoring requires strategic planning and execution. It’s not just about choosing the right cost management software, but also about how you use them. Here are six best practices to guide your journey:

1. Set Goals for Cloud Cost Tracking

The first essential step towards an effective cloud monitoring strategy is setting clear and measurable goals. Without a defined objective, your monitoring efforts can become unfocused and inefficient. The goals you set should align with your broader business objectives. Are you aiming to reduce costs, improve application performance, or enhance security? Each of these objectives will require monitoring different aspects of your cloud environment and using different tools.

For instance, if cost reduction is your primary aim, you might focus on monitoring resource usage and eliminating waste. You would then need to identify key metrics that reflect these areas, such as CPU usage, disk read/write operations, or network bandwidth usage.

Specific examples of cloud monitoring goals might include:

• Reducing downtime by 20% over the next quarter.
• Decreasing response times for a critical business application.
• Cutting cloud expenditure by 15% in the next six months.

Remember, the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). This framework ensures your goals are clear and reachable.

2. Establishing Baselines

Setting baselines is a crucial step in efficient cloud monitoring. They act as your reference point for typical cloud performance. Baselines represent the average performance of your cloud services, such as CPU utilization, data usage, and network traffic.

How to Establish Baselines

Establishing baselines might seem daunting, but it is an essential aspect of cloud monitoring. By setting these benchmarks, you can identify potential issues before they escalate and maintain optimal cloud performance.

Starting with FinOps benchmarking is a great way to establish your initial baselines. FinOps provides a set of best practices aimed at managing and optimizing cloud costs. Its benchmarking process offers a clear picture of your current cloud expenditure, laying an excellent foundation for your baselines.

3. Implement FinOps Monitoring Strategies

FinOps is a relatively new paradigm, but it is quickly becoming a cornerstone of effective cloud cost management. Essentially, FinOps is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling teams to make informed business decisions.

Implementing FinOps strategies can provide numerous benefits for your cloud monitoring practices:

1. Improved Cost Visibility: FinOps practices emphasize full visibility into cloud costs, ensuring that all stakeholders understand what they’re spending and why. It helps establish a culture of cost transparency, leading to better decision-making.
2. Increased Accountability: With FinOps, the responsibility of managing cloud costs is distributed among the team members who actually use the cloud resources. This promotes a sense of ownership and accountability, encouraging teams to use resources more efficiently.
3. Optimized Cloud Spend: FinOps is not just about cost-cutting; it’s about optimizing value. It involves understanding the trade-offs between cost, quality, and speed, and making decisions that yield the best value for your spend.

If you’re new to FinOps, getting started can seem daunting. Here are a few actionable steps to help you begin:

• Establish a Cloud Financial Management Team: This team should consist of members from IT, Finance, and business units, ensuring all perspectives are considered in decision-making.
• Develop a Clear Cost Allocation Strategy: You need to understand who is using what resources and why. Tagging resources appropriately and implementing a showback or chargeback system can be beneficial.
• Continuously Optimize: FinOps is a continuous process. Regularly review your cloud usage and costs, adjust your strategies as needed, and always look for opportunities to optimize.

The FinOps Foundation offers a wealth of resources to help you learn more about this approach and how to implement it effectively. Implementing FinOps strategies in your organization can lead to more efficient cloud usage, better cost control, and ultimately, a more effective cloud monitoring strategy.

4. Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are quantifiable measurements used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee, etc., in meeting objectives for performance. When it comes to cloud monitoring, identifying and focusing on the right KPIs is critical.

The Importance of KPIs in Cloud Monitoring

KPIs act as a bridge between your cloud monitoring goals and the data you collect. They provide insights into how well your cloud resources are meeting the objectives you’ve set. By identifying and tracking the right KPIs, you can effectively measure performance, identify trends, make data-driven decisions, and achieve your cloud monitoring goals.

Tracking FinOps KPIs can help you optimize cloud costs, improve resource efficiency, and align your cloud strategy with your business objectives.

Suggested KPIs to Focus On

While the specific KPIs to track will depend on your business objectives, here are some KPIs commonly tracked in cloud monitoring and FinOps:

• Cloud Spend: This is a basic but crucial KPI. It measures the total amount you spend on cloud services. Tracking this KPI can help you understand your cloud costs and identify opportunities for savings.
• Cost Per Service: This KPI measures the cost of each cloud service you use. It can help you identify which services are costing you the most and whether they are delivering value proportional to their cost.
• Resource Utilization: This KPI measures how effectively you’re using your cloud resources. Low utilization can indicate that you’re overprovisioning resources and wasting money.
• Performance Efficiency: This KPI measures the performance of your cloud services relative to their cost. It can help you identify whether you’re getting good value for your cloud spend.

Remember, the key to effective KPI tracking is not just collecting the data but also analyzing it and using the insights to inform your decisions.

5. Cloud Logging and Monitoring

Logs may be used to track every user action, system fault, application transaction, and network packet movement in today’s digital world. This degree of insight into systems, networks, and applications is beneficial for resolving bottlenecks, reviewing historical trends, and forecasting future occurrences. When an application or infrastructure piece has a performance problem, it generates logs that can snowball in a matter of minutes.

When logs are left unchecked while moving to the public cloud, they can gradually increase expenditure over time. When using public cloud services, the total cost is generally calculated by combining different service aspects such as storage and data transit.

GCP Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Google’s Cloud Logging feature enables you to maintain observability by having express, non-tampering logs that describe all the activity within your Google Cloud environment. Having the ability to store, interact, view and analyze the logs helps you in gaining valuable insights and supplements you in making better decisions.

With the Free Tier’s  50 GiB per project, Google’s Cloud Logging charges $0.5/GiB of ingested logs. While it normally only amounts to a smaller fee, there are times when these expenditures might surge. Although Google has been lenient in such circumstances and has issued reimbursements on occasion, it is critical to have basic control over such operating expenditures in order to prevent inefficiency.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail is a comprehensive logging and monitoring service provided by Amazon Web Services. It facilitates governance, compliance auditing, risk management, and operational troubleshooting by providing a detailed history of events occurring within an AWS account.

From API calls to resource modifications, CloudTrail captures a comprehensive trail of activities, enabling organizations to gain insights into user actions, resource changes, and system behavior.

How frequently should you monitor your cloud costs?

In order to ensure that your cloud costs remain within your desired budget, it is important to monitor your costs on a regular basis.

But how often should you be checking in on your cloud costs?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, including the size of your business and the level of variation in your cloud usage.

However, a good rule of thumb is to check in on your cloud costs at least once a week. This will help you to spot any unexpected spikes in cost and take action to ensure that your costs remain within your budget.

By monitoring your cloud cost on a regular basis, you can make sure that your business stays on budget and does not overspend on cloud services.

‍

Cloud Cost Monitoring Tools

A crucial step in setting up an effective cloud monitoring strategy is selecting the right tools.

Having the right monitoring tools can make the difference between simply collecting data and gaining actionable insights that you can use to improve your cloud operations.

Cloud Expense Tracking Tools in AWS

Various cloud platforms extend an array of native monitoring tools that provide deep insights into your cloud resources’ performance and health.

• AWS Cost Explorer: This tool enables users to visualize and manage their AWS spending and usage data over time. It supports trend analysis and forecasting, helping to identify areas for cost reduction and budget adjustments.
• AWS Trusted Advisor: Provides real-time guidance to help users reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing their AWS environment. This tool offers recommendations that cover a wide range of AWS best practices.
• AWS Cost and Usage Reports: Deliver the most granular data available on your costs and usage. This allows users to access detailed information necessary for advanced cost management strategies.
• AWS CloudTrail: Provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This visibility into user and resource activity can help tighten security and simplify operational analysis and auditing.

Cloud Cost Monitoring Tools in GCP

• GCP FinOps Hub: Serves as a centralized platform for managing and optimizing cloud finances. It offers insights and tools tailored to improve spending efficiency and operational decisions.
• GCP FinOps Score: This feature provides a qualitative measure of an organization's cloud financial management practices. It helps identify strengths and areas for improvement in cloud spending.
• GCP Cloud Logging: Enables you to store, search, analyze, monitor, and alert on logging data and events from Google Cloud. This tool is crucial for understanding operational and security trends to inform cost-effective decisions.
• Billing Export to BigQuery: Allows users to export detailed Google Cloud billing data automatically to BigQuery. This facilitates advanced data analysis and cost monitoring through SQL queries.
• GCP Cloud Monitoring Dashboard: Provides visual insights into your GCP resources and applications, offering metrics, dashboards, and alerts, which are integral for managing cloud operations efficiently.

Resource Monitoring Tools for Microsoft Azure

These native tools are designed to help you monitor every aspect of your Azure expenditure and create strategies for long term cost optimization.

• Cost Allocation Tags: Azure allows users to assign tags to resources, which organize spending information and make it easier to report on cloud costs. These tags can be used to categorize costs by department, project, or any other business structure.
• Azure Budgets: Azure Budgets allows organizations to set financial limits on their spending and forecast future expenses. Users receive alerts as they approach or exceed these budgeted amounts.
• Azure Advisor: This personalized cloud consultant analyzes your Azure resource configurations and usage data, providing recommendations to optimize your Azure deployments for cost, performance, reliability, and security.
• Azure Cost Analysis: This tool within Azure Cost Management offers detailed visualizations of historical and projected costs to help identify spending trends and pinpoint areas for cost optimization.

While these native tools offer robust capabilities, they primarily focus on their respective ecosystems and may not provide a holistic view in a multi-cloud environment.

As such, it might be prudent to complement these native tools with a third-party solution that provides a more comprehensive view of your cloud environment.

Gain Cloud Visibility With Economize

Economize offers dynamic solutions to control your cloud costs. Our platform can provide you with customized alerts and reports to address your organizational needs. Moreover, it has a free tier that helps you to explore the experience before making a long-term commitment.

• Say goodbye to the frustration of managing cost data from multiple sources and embrace the convenience of a unified cost dashboard. No more juggling multiple reports or scratching your head trying to make sense of scattered data.
• With Economize, you've got the flexibility to slice and dice your cost data any way you like. Whether you want to focus on your organization, a specific project, a billing account, or even drill down to the tag level, we've got you covered.
• Economize helps you foster a culture of cost awareness and accountability that'll have your entire organization operating like a well-oiled FinOps machine.
• Our platform also allows you to analyze cost patterns, consumption trends, and even predict future costs. Talk about being prepared for budgeting and financial planning like a boss!

Without proactive monitoring, your cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control. Economize makes your cloud monitoring less chaotic by implementing the right FinOps strategies. Join Economize today to gain actionable insights and better visibility to optimize your cloud spending.