Spiceworks, a professional network for IT, today announced the launch of a free tool called Cloud Cost Monitor, that connects to IT professionals’ Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services accounts to analyze and report on organizations’ infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) costs and utilized resources.
The company explains that the tool’s online dashboard displays a breakdown of an organization’s IaaS spending, including weekly cost trends that can be delivered as an email report. This helps IT professionals identify and address any anomalies in their cloud usage before their monthly invoice arrives.
“The idea to create Cloud Cost Monitor came directly from IT professionals who told us IaaS is fairly easy to start using, but it’s often difficult to manage the costs,” said Tabrez Syed, Vice President of Products, Spiceworks.
With a focus on simplifying how IT professionals get their jobs done, creating this tool was a no brainer in order to help them manage their cloud spending and have peace of mind when their bill comes.
According to Spiceworks’ study “Diving into IT Cloud Services”, only 25 percent of IT professionals believe cloud services are more cost effective than on-premises infrastructure, potentially due to a lack of visibility in how their cloud services are being utilized and the impact on monthly costs.
Hence, Cloud Cost Monitor claims to be designed to help IT professionals overcome the challenges of keeping their IaaS costs under control by enabling them to track how their usage and costs are trending over time.
“Spiceworks Cloud Cost Monitor has helped fill a gap in managing our cloud costs in Azure,” said Bruce Gilbert, Chief Technology Officer, YSTA Services.
With daily and weekly spending reports, if we forget to turn off a large instance or if we used a lot of bandwidth doing a backup restore, we can easily spot these irregularities and address them before we get the monthly bill.
The company claims that IT professionals can set up Cloud Cost Monitor in less than five minutes to quickly see their cloud computing, storage, database, and networking usage, track how their service costs change over time.
With this tool, companies can also identify cloud services that are unused or using too much bandwidth. The tool’s weekly email reports include cost comparisons to previous weeks as well as overall cost trends that enable IT professionals to manage IaaS spending from their inbox.