Cloud has become an essential component of modern business operations, with many organizations embracing cloud solutions for their scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. However, as more organizations continue to adopt cloud computing, managing cloud expenses has become a challenge.
ManageEngine CloudSpend is a cloud cost management tool that helps organizations monitor and manage cloud expenses efficiently. It provides organizations with relevant and real-time data on their cloud usage, costs, and consumption, enabling them to make informed decisions when it comes to cloud financials.
For teams spread across the globe, it becomes challenging to track the cloud usage and bill them at a business unit level. CloudSpend addresses this issue by providing organizations with a comprehensive view of their cloud costs, helping them optimize their cloud usage and reduce costs across teams.
Curious case of business units
Let’s take a instance where the teams are spread geographically and are using AWS/Azure cloud services for developing an application. If by chance, a developer left an EC2 instance idle for quite some time, it might cause the cloud bill to shoot up for the respective team. Without a budget alert, the respective business unit would owe a hefty amount for the underutilized or idle resources.
Your FinOps team is likely comprised of a CTO, a CFO, and business decision makers who want to have transparency on bills and usage. But when your FinOps team is clueless about the cloud usage of business units, it becomes tough for your organization to leverage the benefits of cloud. CloudSpend by Site24x7 allows your FinOps team to configure budget alerts and configure budgets for each Business Units (BU). If a resource breaches its stipulated budget at a business unit level, it triggers an alert for that unit and enables the FinOps team to have an effective chargeback mechanism.
Be a superhero with CloudSpend
- Cost allocation: Allocate costs to different business units based on their usage of cloud resources.
- Budgeting: Set budgets for each business unit and track their spending against those budgets.
- Cost optimization: Optimize your cloud costs by identifying areas where you can reduce spending without affecting your operations.
- Resource monitoring: Monitor your cloud resources in real time, so you can identify any anomalies or irregularities that might indicate wasteful spending.
- Reporting: Use detailed reports on your cloud bills to identify trends and patterns that can help you make informed decisions about your cloud strategy.
- Role-based access control: Define different levels of access for different users or groups within your organization, so you can control who has access to sensitive financial data.
A deep dive into Business Units
The Spend Analysis view of Business Units provides information regarding the breakdown of costs by Service, Account, Region, Component, Trend, and Resource. By selecting a particular Business Unit from the dashboard, you will be directed to the Spend Analysis section for that Business Unit.
Here, you can access details such as the total incurred cost, the account with the highest spending, and the account with the lowest spending. Additionally, you can customize the time and view the cost data within that period. The option to add and configure Business Units, Budgets, and Schedule Reports is available through the Add button that provides you with a seamless experience.
Budgets in Business Units
You have the option to create budgets for each Business Unit, allowing you to control costs effectively. These budgets can be set to run on a monthly, quarterly, yearly, month-to-date, or year-to-date basis, alerting you to any expenses that exceed the set limits. By creating a Budget Policy and linking it to a specific budget, you can assign it to a Business Unit, enabling each team to monitor and effectively manage their cloud expenditures within their allocated budget.
Forecasting in Business Units
Allocating costs equally to individual departments and adhering to the monthly budget can be a challenging process for Business Units. Nevertheless, by practicing responsible accounting and implementing chargebacks, FinOps teams can identify departments that surpass their budgets, monitor the factors that cause increased expenses, and effectively utilize tools such as budgeting and forecasting.
While budgeting revolves around a Business Unit’s desired targets or anticipated expenses, forecasting serves as a reality check by analyzing past data to determine if expenses will align with the budget objectives or surpass them. Consequently, forecasting allows administrators to adjust resource allocation and modify plans accordingly.
Tagging in Business Units
In your cloud bills, there are embedded tags or automatically generated tags that serve as specific entities. These tags have been parsed and assigned to help you conveniently organize costs. They include custom tags defined by users as well as tags generated by the system and configured in the cloud portal.
To gain access to the cost view of a specific Resource Group, consider this scenario: begin by selecting an account that contains the desired Resource Group. Then, opt for a built-in tag called “resourceGroup”. By doing so, you will be able to examine detailed data about the cost analysis of that particular Resource Group.
Tag Profiles in Business Units allows customization of tags by assigning a distinct key and value to each tag. Each tag key can be associated with only one value. These profiles permit the merging of two or more tags, using logical operators like AND, OR, or a combination of both, in order to generate a final tag value.
ManageEngine CloudSpend is a cloud cost management tool that helps organizations manage and optimize their cloud bills. Managing business units is tough when teams are large and it becomes difficult to bring all of them under one roof. CloudSpend helps you do it though a single dashboard mechanism and provides real-time data on cloud usage of each of these business units.
With CloudSpend, organizations can reduce their cloud costs significantly, improve their budget management, and enhance their cloud visibility. Visit ManageEngine CloudSpend page to know more about its other features.
Related Categories