As you begin to adopt a hybrid cloud model, how you think about resources must change. In private cloud environments, you have already paid for the hardware, software, etc. However, in the public cloud, you are consuming and paying for everything by the pay-as-you-go model.
Your accounting model, and how you think of your IT budget, must now change. On one hand, you do not want to spend everything on Day One or even lose your budget by not using it. Hint: buying reserved capacity can help you utilize your budget in an optimal way.
Your finance team expects you to report on your capacity, usage, and performance differently since they want to keep a tab on everything. In fact, finance and IT teams need to partner in this journey as you redefine your value to your own business and IT consumers.
Reliance on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
For better management of your hybrid cloud, use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure success. You need to be more proactive and not reactive on every front. This will help you not only realize the planned savings, use your budget efficiently but also integrate new technologies effectively for your business. For example, some of the KPIs you can use for your environment are:
- Daily cost increase by department/applications ($)
- Zombie resources cost ($)
- Percent of reserved instances vs. total resources (%)
- Percent of bill shamed back (%)
- Utilization of EC2 instances (%)
- Resource usage for Production environment (%)
CloudBolt For Complete Visibility
Gaining complete visibility is one of the most basic and important milestones you should work towards as you move to a hybrid cloud environment. You need to understand your environment through different lenses (i.e. as a whole, by groups, applications, users, etc.). It is easier said than done, especially since you get data from your providers in a disparate format that may be difficult to consume and comprehend.
You need a tool that can help you understand not only the broad strokes but also the nuances. It should also become a single-pane-of-glass for your team even with different sources and data types. For example, data from your AWS invoice, or data center information about hardware, software, heating, cooling, etc. That’s a lot of information to maintain in a worksheet. You need a reliable tool that can scale as your environment grows.
CloudBolt provides comprehensive visibility and reporting capabilities for your private and public cloud environments. It provides a variety of reports and dashboards that you can use to gain granular insights into your organizations, applications, or users. You can also customize these reports further to slice and dice the same information in the most relevant format. The following image shows a dashboard for your environment which you can further customize (by groups, servers, owners, etc.).
Example below is focused on the cost of servers. It is focused on all the groups for the month of March 2020. However, you can further categorize it for a particular group or application of your choice. This gives you the power to compare costs across groups or applications over a period of time. You can email this report to your finance team or export this as a comma-separated value (CSV) report for integration with existing tools if needed.
CloudBolt simplifies cost management across clouds, data centers or other environments from a single platform.
To schedule a quick demo to see the cost features in action, click here.
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