Insightful when Maintained Effectively
What do you like best about the product?
CloudZero gives us great insights into our cloud spending. Its ability to allocate costs to specific teams, products, and features has significantly improved our understanding of where resources are being consumed, giving us a more wholistic view of the environment.
What do you dislike about the product?
The learning curve for using CloudZero's key features can be rough for new users. Additionally, initial setup and and jumping in when it hasn't been updated recently required a good amount of effort to ensure accurate cost attribution, and if not maintained, it obviously hurts the amount of insight that can be derived .
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Wholistic view of our spending profile and easy allocation across departments and teams
Great solution for our cloud FinOps needs
What do you like best about the product?
Support for all of our major providers, from the infrastructure providers to major other services like Snowflake, Datadog, etc. Flexible reporting and alerting, stellar customer success managers. Its like having a great tool and second set of eyes on our spend.
What do you dislike about the product?
Small company with immaturity in places, still learning, but listening and moving forward. Note this is minor and has much improved over the last couple years.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Visibility into spend. Even with a single infrastructure provider like AWS it was much improved over what they offer. But having that same visibility accross all our major spend for R&D (outside of people) is fantastic. We can track spend, report back on projects, initiatives etc. We get alerts on spikes and proactively chase unexpected cost spikes etc. We find issues before Finance notices.
An invaluable tool for understanding and attributing where your cloud spend is coming from
What do you like best about the product?
The attribution model (cost-formation) is really powerful (without being too complex). It's helped us to allocate cost at various levels of the organisation. This in combination with the great UI enables infrequent users to quickly see what they are spending.
What do you dislike about the product?
The forecasting side of the tool is pretty limited it would be great to see this evolve especially through the use of AI.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Enables us to interpret, allocate and represent our cloud spend (across multiple vendors).
We're also using the allocated data to feed back into our BI tooling and give us real time unit cost.
CloudZero has been an excellent window into our Cloud Spend
What do you like best about the product?
CloudZero can give you an excellent view into your Cloud costs, enabling you the flexibility to cut up complex infrastructure into buckets that make sense for your use case.
The ability to quickly integrate multiple Cloud Providers into the tool gives an amazing single pane of glass. This allows for easy comparison between spend changes across multiple vectors.
Asside from the software itself, the access you gain to a FinOps Account manager has been great. Having an expert from the CloudZero side to support in configuration and troubleshoot problems enables things to get sorted quickly - ultimately improving the experience for internal customers.
What do you dislike about the product?
Where I think they can improve is arround some of their reporting functionality. In part, this is the overall management of those alerts including configuration and dissmissal but also the depth of information they provide.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CloudZero enables us to view and breakdown cloud costs across all of our Cloud Providers. Its providing a single pane of glass view, that prevents this information in a way that makes sense for engineers and product managers.
The engine underneath is allowing us to calculate unit costs and ultimately the efficicency of the infrastructure that we're providing.
This level of visibility at scale is something we have never had.
Provide Cost allocation, Spending Insights and Support Financial Planning of our Cloud Spend
What do you like best about the product?
CloudZero makes it easy for us to allocate costs and understand the spending for our Cloud environment (primary AWS). Additionally, it allows us to generate insights and clearly flag changes that are unexpected or resulting from architectural decisions. We are leveraging CloudZero mostly on the engineering level with our delivery teams, but we also use it as a financial support team to plan our costs and allow financial reconciliation.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are still some open points to integrating the discovered Insights into our processes, such as a Jira Integration allowing our Engineers to act on findings even faster.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost allocation of AWS Spend. Understanding spends across services and allocation of cost to different services.
Cloud Cost transparency at the next level
What do you like best about the product?
Easy interface. Ability to integrate over 50+ telemetries and allocation for our org. Great self-service dashboard capabilities. Unlocking cost transparency at the ressource level makes it accessible from C-Level to engineer and is the key piece to enable FinOps throughout the organization. Great customer support team, post sales and constant product evolution is amazing! Implementation was very easy even given our highly complex telemetries for shared cost.
What do you dislike about the product?
We used to have some latencies in loading dashboards and explorer views, but this has been fixed several months ago.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Enabling cloud cost transparency at scale down to the engineer. Business and tech KPI tracking throughout all levels of the org.
CloudZero Hero
What do you like best about the product?
CloudZero has been great since day 1. Y'all nail ease of use, implementation, customer support (pre and post sales), and is a fantastic platform for FinOps. We have over 358 users now too.
What do you dislike about the product?
Insights platform has a lot of work to do be done
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We'll be using CloudZero for a lot more than just Cloud Cost Management -> true business optimization is our goal through a comprehensive single pane of glass.
CZ review
What do you like best about the product?
the anomaly detection and kubernetes cost allocation are the 2 things I like best about CZ. The platform also enables cross functional collaboration
What do you dislike about the product?
Not 100% due to CloudZero but billing data can take long time to be populated.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
detailed visibility into cloud spending
Allows many users to build new dashboards and integrate more data compared to other BI dashboards
What is our primary use case?
We are using CloudZero for all the financial statistics to manage finances related to AWS, Azure, GCP, Datadog, and New Relic.
What is most valuable?
The best part of CloudZero is the UI for creating dashboards. It allows many users to build new dashboards and integrate more data compared to other BI dashboards. Users can create custom settings for budget forecasting and make their own backend configurations independently without involving CloudZero's team.
What needs improvement?
There is a need for UI improvements. We are in discussions to provide feedback for changes and enhance the dashboard to match our requirements.
For how long have I used the solution?
Our company has been using CloudZero for around four to five months. It is a new product for us.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is pretty good if you have some coding experience. However, certain unique keywords need to be studied initially.
How are customer service and support?
The support team is quite good. We are directly connected with the officers since we are making a complete configuration from scratch. Currently, there is no dedicated support team; we connect directly with the engineering team and officers.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before CloudZero, we were using Cloudability.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward and quite easy for us because we have good support and a finance account manager connecting with us.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not sure about the exact pricing since we have an enterprise segment. It is quite cost-friendly compared to other platforms.
What other advice do I have?
I would not recommend it to small setups. It is preferable for larger enterprises with significant financial needs on cloud platforms.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
Used for compliance and tagging with cost optimization but have complex workflow
What is most valuable?
If you want to build, its workflow is very complex.
What needs improvement?
We wanted it for compliance and tagging purposes. They could not satisfy our needs because we were looking for something in a graphical form, like pie charts, and for untagged tech. We were applying various filters that they did not support. It is good for cost optimization but ineffective for tagging compliance and budget allocation.
I rate cost optimization as three-point five out of five. I give budget allocation a two out of five. Tagging Compliance is the main reason we decided not to go with it. I would rate it two out of five.
The tool charges one percent of cloud users, which is too much based on the capabilities they are providing.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's a scalable product. We started with a very limited set of data, but it is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
Support is fine. They are responsive and knowledgeable.
How was the initial setup?
It is deployed on the cloud.
What other advice do I have?
We have many other tools. Even among the many tools we have seen and evaluated, some have far better capabilities than Cloudability or others. So, every tool has its pros and cons.
Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.
