How Cloud Insights works

Cloud Insights continuously monitors your cloud infrastructure to analyze costs so you can identify and take action on resources to save money and optimize operations.

Cloud Insights benefits

Benefits for Executives

To help ensure that your cloud usage is in line with your organization's budget, vision, and goals, Cloud Insights provides the following benefits:

• Accurate, current, and easy-to-digest information.
• The ability to tie cloud use (what is used and when, who has access and for how long) into measurable outcomes, which enables you to predict the need for investment and to meet and exceed customer demand with timely releases.

Benefits for Cloud Administrators

You need to set up and monitor cloud usage, to track metrics such as changes in integration or the number of code or infrastructure changes, to review forecasting and weekly trends to determine better provisioning strategies, to share usage reports with management and execs, and to shut down or rightsize resources when appropriate. Cloud Insights enables you to accomplish the following tasks:

• Set up data collection and usage policies.
• Monitor usage and shut down or rightsize resources as needed.
• Design custom reports that display clear and actionable information.
• Confidently share reports with management.
• View weekly trends with forecasting tools.
• Define the information that is relevant to you and access it quickly.

Benefits for Cloud Managers

You need to define project and portfolio goals, understand how and why resources are being provisioned, monitor and act on burn rates, forecast your cloud spend and then share cost and forecast info with your team and with execs. Cloud Insights lets you accomplish those tasks:

• View dashboards with burn rates and insight into events and trends on costs and usage.
• Design dynamic reports for execs and upper-level managers.
• Proactively identify potential issues and then take action to avoid them.

Questions that you need answers to

How much am I spending in the public cloud? Am I paying for resources that are over-provisioned, underused, or not used at all?

• Cloud Spend Analytics reports help you to identify opportunities to reduce cloud costs. See the Cloud spend reports: Last 30 Day Spend, Cloud spend reports: Monthly Spend, and Cloud spend reports: Forecast
• The Rightsizing feature analyzes resource usage to recommend better sizes for resources that are wasting money by being over-provisioned or underused. A confidence rating and predicted savings support each recommendation. You schedule Rightsizing jobs to resize the resources you specify. See Rightsizing: Cost-effective sizing for resources.
• The Unused Machines feature analyzes usage data to identify resources that are wasting money because they are not used. You schedule Unused Machines jobs to power-off or terminate the resources that you specify. See Reducing costs due to unused machines.

Which assets are operating outside the hours that they should be operating?

A Business Hours job applies policies to identify resources that are running when they should be powered off, reports them, and can start and stop them on a schedule that you specify. Running only during specified business hours can significantly reduce your cloud spend. See Business Hours: Ensuring resources run only when required.

Do all my cloud assets follow my policies? Which assets can I not track accurately because they are not properly tagged with an assignment group? Am I paying for resources that are not "owned" by a cost center or department?

To ensure that the information on usage and spending is accurate, Unassigned Resources policies identify resources that do not belong to an assignment group. For such resources, the policy can auto-assign an assignment group to a resource, require a member of the assignment group to approve the assignment, or add the resource to a report and take no further action. See Updating unassigned resources to ensure accurate governance.