AC3 Hyperscale Billing Specialist, Erica Kuchin, talks about how to amalgamate all the cloud data into one place, and how it gives organisations the ability to see what they’re spending and how they’re spending it, and manage cloud spend.
The benefits of CloudHealth
For Erica, the benefits of CloudHealth are multifaceted for organisations. “It’s an intuitive and easy to understand layout,” she says. “Not only is it easy to use, but it’s dynamic. The reports are pulling data in near real-time. Data can be easily consumed once available from the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs),” Erica continues.
For those organisations that have multiple CSPs that they consume services from, CloudHealth possesses the ability to have dashboards across each one. “It’s not just one view at a high level, but it’s granular. This strengthens the decision making process for organisations because they have that data visibility.”
Understanding spend using CloudHealth
With the accessibility of near real-time data, CloudHealth is able to provide organisations with snapshots that allow quick decision making. “CloudHealth builds on the native cloud tools,” Erica says about using CloudHealth. “It’s enhancing the organisation’s experience of the cloud, not necessarily taking it over.”
“CloudHealth builds on the native cloud tools. It’s enhancing the organisation’s experience of the cloud, not necessarily taking it over.”
It also provides the results in both raw data and visual layouts.
“If organisations are needing to get a quick snapshot of where the largest spend is right now, they can open up a customised and easy to understand graph of near real-time data.”
CloudHealth assists by identifying opportunities to reduce wasted spend.
“You can detect which resources are underutilised with CloudHealth rightsizing,” Erica explains. “You can investigate options for reserved instances and savings plans as well.”
The tooling within CloudHealth does allow parameters to be set for rightsizing; including which environments you specifically want to look at, how far back you want to investigate, and what your theoretical outcome is. “For rightsizing, it’s the metrics that you input that will determine the output,” Erica says about the more detailed look into CSP spend. “Users can deep dive into the recommendations that the tooling provides.”
Cloud optimisation
For Erica, a lot of the work that she does daily is a look into the cost optimisation and recommendations around reserved instances (RI) and savings plans (SP). To do this job, Erica relies on the usage tool in CloudHealth.
“I rely quite heavily on the usage tool.” she says. “The usage tool is a report that is native to CloudHealth.”
The usage tool helps with cost optimisation as it reviews the highest spend within an environment.
CloudHealth has the ability to monitor budgets. From this, organisations are able to set governance policies, and automated alerts in order to provide feedback on spend.
For organisations, CloudHealth provides a transparent and simple-to-use platform that has proven to be effective in cost reduction and provides a deep dive into where cost is being wasted, and therefore allowing organisations to optimise their spend in the cloud.