From cloud cost management angle, comprehensive cloud cost spend across multiple clouds as well as granular drill downs into each of the cost elements is very important for tighter cost control and cloud spend management. As enterprises are adopting cloud across many line of businesses, departments, vertical functions and geographies, an enterprise class cloud analytics tool is a must have for holistic cloud cost management.

1. How to Manage, Visualize and track all your Private and
Public cloud spend?
From cloud cost management angle, comprehensive cloud cost analytics across
multiple clouds as well as granular drill downs into each of the cost elements is
very important for tighter cost control and management. As enterprises are
adopting cloud across many line of businesses, departments, vertical functions
and geographies, an enterprise class cloud analytics tool is a must have for
holistic cloud cost management. As indicated in many of the cloud cost
optimization studies published in the industry, rich cloud analytics tools can
save up to 70% of cloud resource cost by giving cloud administrator visibility
into optimal placement, utilization and right sizing of the cloud resources.
Jamcracker cloud platform (JCP) offers many valuable tools to holistically
manage cloud costs across an enterprise organization. As an example, one of
the key reports called Daily Consumption Report (DCR) report enables IT

2. administrators to customize various cloud consumption parameters of interest
such as product type, usage type, charge type, currency, quantity, unit price,
unit quantity, consumption amount, etc. Thus, DCR report can be customized
to aggregate the cloud cost and usage information on a daily basis across
multiple clouds for a specific date range.
While reporting is a great on-demand tool for historical trend analysis of the
data available in the datamarts, it does not give real time snapshot of what’s
happening in terms of cloud consumption across an enterprise. Further,
business users are often not interested in the technical details of cloud
resources being consumed but rather the business impacting issues such as the
overall cloud cost trends, cost savings due to cloud migration, cloud cost mix
by cloud service providers and the overall return on investment (ROI) for the
cloud deployments. This is why cloud cost management dashboards are such a
powerful tool for not only the IT administrators but also the business users
such as IT business analysts and IT finance managers.
In JCP – Cloud Analytics virtual appliance module, we provide various
dashboards to address the needs for different stakeholders who need to keep
a close watch on the live cloud usage across all parts of an enterprise. These
dashboards offer live cloud consumption intelligence including cost associated
with each of the cloud resources, usage of these resources and any missed
opportunities for cloud cost optimization.
Let’s drill down into each of these dashboards and understand the benefits of
each type of these dashboards:
1. Executive Dashboard
As the name suggests, executive dashboard is an important visualization tool
for the executives. It tracks key cloud trends such as costs and resources in
order to help DevOps, IT Managers, CIOs, CTOs, and Finance departments to
oversee all of the cloud costs centrally.

3. Following are some of the key attributes of the information that can aid
executives in making investment and ROI decisions:
Cloud Cost Trend: The Cloud Cost Trend shows the cost trends based on
previous spending providing valuable information about cost anomalies.
Analyzing the trend over monthly, year-to-date or a specific date range will
give valuable insight on critical trends, spikes, and recurring patterns and
enables you to react instantly and avoid unnecessary upcoming costs.
Cost by Provider: In a multi-cloud deployment, identify cost for each cloud
service provider and compare the costs across providers. This data will provide
insights to optimize spending and provide optimal workload allocation insights.

4. Cost by Products: View of cloud cost by specific cloud services consumed
within an organization. All services (SaaS, IaaS or PaaS) consumed during a
selected period are considered.
Cost by Resources: A cloud resource can be a virtual machine, storage volume,
snapshots, machine images, IP address or any other resource that is consumed
from a cloud service provider. The resource label is comprised of resource ID,
resource name, and the provider's name and it uniquely identifies a cloud
resource.
Cost by Tags: For organizations that take advantage of the resource-based
tagging feature, this dashboard view can be used to visualize costs based on
environment, project, cost center, department or any other tagging dimension.
Tags allow cost management on a granular level and align cloud cost to an
organization’s structure. Gain better visibility into untagged infrastructure
resources and ensure accountability of cloud resources by assigning tags to
unmanaged resources
2. Live Dashboard
Live Dashboard is an important visualization tool for daily operations staff such
as IT administrators. It offers real-time inventory of the IaaS resources from
various cloud providers.

7. Following are some of the key attributes of the information that can aid
executives in analyzing real time health check of cloud usage and cost:
Resource Summary: Resource summary lists the cloud resources along with
their current state information.
AWS Reserved Instances: View the list of reserved instances for an account by
clicking Reserved Instances tab. You can view additional details of a specific
reserved instance record such as scope, instance type, platforms, tenancy,
terms and payment details, and offering types.
3. Cost Analytics
Since up to 70% of the cloud cost can be optimized through better utilization of
cloud resources in terms of unused as well as under utilized cloud resources,
cloud cost analytics dashboard is an important visibility tool to see if cloud
resources are being consumed optimally.

8. Following are some of the key attributes of the information in this dashboard
that can allow IT administrators to dig deeper into the cloud resource cost and
aid with right sizing of the resource.
Product Cost Trend: View the cost trend for each product as well as the
forecast for infrastructure services and plan the strategy for cost optimization.
VM Count by Instance Type/Size/Flavor: The cost of a virtual machine can be
broken down by various sizing tiers such as micro, small, standard, etc. Each
instance is further classified based upon its purpose e.g. for general use,
computation intensive, storage, GPU, or memory.
Resource Count by Region: Different cloud regions have different pricing for
each cloud provider. Resource usage can be identified and scaled effectively by
this visualization that indicates the number of resources associated with each
region. The label used to depict the resource count is a combination of the
cloud region and the cloud provider’s name.
Resource Cost by Region: Not all cloud infrastructure regions are priced the
same. Varying resource cost across different regions supported by a cloud
provider or among various cloud providers make it necessary to view cloud
costs based on regions supported by each of the cloud providers. This feature
is especially important as it provides a quick comparison of the cost for
deploying a certain type of resource in a specific region and aids in choosing
the right cloud provider that fits IT needs and offers lowest price.
Cost by IaaS Usage Type: Analyzing costs based on the infrastructure usage
type provides insights into hidden resource usage costs. Take the necessary
action by terminating or re-sizing the instances.
Cost by OS Platform: Cloud providers often charge a premium for the
instances running Windows server as they need to cover windows server
licensing cost. Hence, cost details based on the OS platform can be very helpful
to see where IT dollars are spent in terms of OS platform provided by a cloud
provider.
4. Tag Analytics

9. Tag-based cost allocation involves analyzing and associating the costs with
specific categories (e.g. department, projects, etc.) to provide cost visibility
allowing asset management, security, and compliance tracking. This dashboard
allows IT users to view the cost associated with this resource based on
different dimensions and enables you to organize your resources in a way that
is independent of the cloud service provider.

10. Following are some of the key attributes of the information in this dashboard
that can allow IT administrators to visualize cloud resource cost based on
associated consumption tags.
Product Cost by Tags: Analyze the cost of infrastructure services based on the
resource tags and identify the cost drivers mapped to different organizational
units.
VM Count by Tags: The count of VMs grouped according to an organization’s
tagging schema will be displayed allowing the IT team to immediately identify
whether their infrastructure requires adjustment. For the selected Tag key, this
dashboard displays total number of instances for each of the associated Tag
Values.
VM Cost by Tags: Tagging provides an efficient way to track and organize your
resources based on the cost. For the selected Tag key, the report displays the
cost of instances for each of the associated Tag Values. Thus, tags help to
analyze your virtual machines cost to reflect your own cost structure.
Tag Cost Trend: View the historical cost trend of resources based on a
particular Tag key-value pair selection. This report considers all resources
Tagged based on the tagging standards in your organization and provide
insights cost effectiveness.
Instance Type/Flavor/Size by Tags: Different providers offer different instance
families to choose from and a variety of sizes for each instance type. For
optimal resource allocation, analyze the cost of different types of Instances
based on the associated tags.
In conclusion, in order to efficiently manage the usage and cost of cloud
resources, a rich cloud analytics engine is the need of time. Various
stakeholders such as the IT business analysts, finance managers, devops users
from business units and CTO staff all need visibility into cloud consumption on
a real-time and historical basis. With various dashboards that are available in
the Jamcracker Cloud Platform, customers can gain instant visibility and almost
feel like they got the superpowers to manage cloud cost.

11. Give JCP-Cloud Analytics appliance a spin with our 30-day free trial program.
You have got nothing to lose and only to gain. Now, give kudos to yourself for
taking the first step to saving your company or customers a lot of money!
Stay tuned for our next blog on saving even more cloud cost through
automated cloud control policies.