Catch The Highlights Of This 2024 Live CloudZero Demo

It’s all well and good to say that “every engineering decision is a buying decision.” It’s one of our favorite phrases here at CloudZero! However, it’s one thing to say it and quite another to LIVE IT.

That’s pretty much the driving force behind CloudZero: We want your team to be able to access your company’s cloud spend data, analyze it from every angle that might be helpful, and use that information to grow the business. Do it right and everybody wins—your customers get better service, and you save money in the cloud.

That’s why we asked Ben Austin of our Product Marketing team and Sean Korten, one of our Senior Sales Engineers, to put together this live CloudZero demo. We want you to see how the platform works up close and in detail, so you can learn to use your company’s cost data to its full potential.

Check out the highlights below.

Here’s What You Can Co With CloudZero

Tracking cloud costs the old fashioned way is difficult if not impossible.

Between multi-cloud environments, incomplete tagging capabilities, and complex systems of shared resources, it can be a nightmare to comb through the snarls of data and figure out which dollars should be allocated where.

The goal of the CloudZero platform is to break down that complexity and make it simple and even easy to understand your cost data.

Data ingestion

You might operate within one cloud environment or a dozen. Regardless of how spread-out your costs might be, CloudZero will pull all of that data together into one central hub and standardize it into a format that makes sense across the board.

Cost allocation

Once your data from each cloud provider has been collected, it is assigned into buckets that show you where your money is going each month.

Here’s a glimpse into a sample cost allocation dashboard:

Data analysis

You can view your data in a number of different ways on the CloudZero cost reporting dashboard to analyze your spending from every angle.

Let’s say during your analysis you noticed your spending has dramatically increased for one client. Here’s how you might do a little digging to find the resources that are soaking up most of your budget:

In addition to our cost reporting dashboard, we also offer an in-depth analytics view. Our analytics tools allow you to look deeply into where your money is going. This is a great resource to explore if you notice a spending anomaly or if your budget is climbing each month and you’re not sure why.

Here’s a quick tour of the analytics capabilities on the CloudZero platform:

Team engagement

Next, you can use the information you have gathered to show your team how to make good cost decisions and further your company goals.

For example, you could send your team leaders the discoveries you made during your analysis. Or, you could ask your engineers what changes the company might need to make to bring the anomalies back down to an expected spending level.

Speaking of engineers…

Have you historically had trouble getting your engineers interested in and on board with new cost optimization efforts? It’s a common problem shared by most SaaS companies.

However, we’ve found that giving engineers lots of data and the power to interpret that data brings out the best in them. After all, these are folks who dedicate their daily work lives to solving problems and optimizing situations to get the best results.

That’s why we’ve created several different views for engineers to explore and play with. But if all else fails, your engineers can always stay up-to-date with the daily Slack or email messages that provide contextualized cost data in a way that isn’t obtrusive to an engineer’s normal workflow.

Stakeholder accountability

It’s not easy to have budget conversations with every team in your company. This is especially true if you only have a vague idea that your costs are too high, but you can’t pinpoint why those costs are high or who specifically could take charge to solve the problem.

That’s why showbacks are important. With detailed cost showbacks, you can keep track of how each member of your team contributes to costs. More importantly, you can show these folks how their decisions affect the company’s bottom line. For most people, this creates a natural desire to improve.

Unit economics

If you want to maximize the profitability of your business, there’s really no getting around unit economics. Understanding your unit economics—the costs per customer, per feature, per product, per demographic, per resource, etc.—gives you the ability to see when your resource usage isn’t optimal, restructure your pricing and packaging tiers, and catch cost bloat before it gets out of control.

Here’s how you can use our dashboard to look at different unit economics:

Forecasting

Once you have a granular understanding of your unit economics, you can calculate the results of numerous different scenarios and choose the best path forward. In fact, we’d argue that accurate forecasting is one of the most powerful ways you can use unit economics to your advantage when you want to widen your margins or grow your business.

But don’t worry. You don’t have to do all that math by hand:

“Run” levels of cloud efficiency

What happens when you can bring in all of your cost data from every single provider source, combine it with all your customer data, and break it down any which way you’d like as you complete your analysis?

You get a living, big picture view of the health of your company from month to month.

And with that, you can make future projections, plan major innovations, optimize resource usage and spending, and gauge progress in fine detail.

This is what we mean when we talk about the “run” stage of the FinOps journey. You’ve put in the work, assembled the data, and now you’re off to the races. Not to mix metaphors, but—the sky is your only limit now.

Ready To Get Started?

You won’t know what CloudZero can do for your business unless you put it to the test. This time next year—or even next month—you might be astounded by how much money you’ve saved by tracking your unit economics and getting all your team members involved in the FinOps journey!

when you’re ready to take the next step (or simply ask some questions).

Author: Cody Slingerland

Cody Slingerland, a FinOps certified practitioner, is an avid content creator with over 10 years of experience creating content for SaaS and technology companies. Cody collaborates with internal team members and subject matter experts to create expert-written content on the CloudZero blog.