What do you like best about the product?

easy menus to filter data and get to exactly what you need to see

What do you dislike about the product?

Frequency of data update, need realtime.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

cost savings

What do you like best about the product?

Good people to work with and help us with COGS and cost visualization across AWS, Snowflake.

What do you dislike about the product?

No dislike, but we need integrations with GCP and NewRelic. We also need forecasting ability for 1 year (not just for 1 month)

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Overall cost visualization.

What do you like best about the product?

It is easy for us to see breakdowns on different levels across the company. As a squad member I am interested to see how my team is spending money, but then it's also easy to validate this spending across the larger organization and compare how my team is doing.

What do you dislike about the product?

Using the tool from the APAC region is slower than I would like; it takes a while to filter down into the dimensions I'm interested in, and it's slow to move between the different filters. The slowness makes using the tool cumbersome from time to time, especially when you want to take a glance at your metrics.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

This tool gives us detailed, hour-to-hour insights into our spending. When we are migrating our services, we can easily see the costs shift around. The software provides us with the confidence we are not missing any old resources when tidying up our migration.

What do you like best about the product?

They show you all the details of your spending. I especially appreciate their anomaly detection and alerts. That allows reacting quickly when something goes awry .,

What do you dislike about the product?

I would like to see more flexibility with alert configuring. Allow more than one channel and e-mail, allow configure custom alert criteria.
We are also looking forward to being able to use CZ on the GCP.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Recently, we were alerted by CZ about a spending anomaly with one of the products we use. It grew slowly, and we did not notice. When CZ warned us, we could drastically reduce spending on this product by optimizing its configuration.

What do you like best about the product?

* Setup and connection to your AWS accounts is really smooth and easy and utilizes least-privilege IAM permissions. The team has done a masterful job on this.

* The ability to slice and dice your cost data by so many different dimensions is a killer feature, especially the tag support. It's pretty easy to start to see immediate insights even without a reasonable tagging strategy or naming conventions. With a solid organizational strategy is where you find the biggest benefits - rolling up costs for teams/services/features or attributing cost per customer. CloudZero gives you insight into your cloud spend, but it also indirectly guides you towards building better products where such analysis is possible.

* The ability to see untagged resources in context via extrapolated metadata and related resources is a big help in cleaning up messes like old unmanaged AWS accounts and abandoned experiments.

* The performance and UX of the platform is quite good given the volume of billing data, screens are uncluttered and the information is easy to consume.

* The "resource diff" feature, while rudimentary at present, is a useful data point that can help you figure out why a cost anomaly might have occurred.

* The ability to change "cost views", e.g. real cost, billed cost, is supremely useful for communicating with different audiences. The unmodified AWS bill is terribly difficult to interpret if you're a developer trying to figure out why your service is suddenly costing more.

* Cost anomaly detection has saved my bacon on a number of occasions, especially when doing serverless work. Even with EC2-based systems it's useful - helping me find suddenly-overprovisioned clusters or instances left running.

* Seeing relationships for a resource you're analyzing is very useful when trying to solve a billing mystery. Often, a resource might have an incomprehensible name, but when seen in context with other related resources it becomes far more obvious what it is.

* The monthly trends, slack alerts, and document downloads are all great features. Each one helps you see your spend from a different angle.

* I like very much that CloudZero is branching out from EC2 and serverless into other areas like kubernetes and snowflake. Cost analysis is useful everywhere.

* The focus on unit economics applied to your cloud spend is highly welcome and a trend I'd like to see continue. It's a mark of organizational maturity to perform this analysis; I'd like it to be on the minds of every executive I work with. The fact that CloudZero says "yes, we value this philosophy and will help you with answering these questions" is a big reason why I chose CloudZero, and why I will continue to do so.

What do you dislike about the product?

* The ML features around untagged/unknown resources, while extremely useful, do not seem intuitive. I feel like there needs to be some sort of guide or wizard that can help you go from "I just connected these accounts" to "hey this thing is finding structure I didn't know about" to "hey I've mastered my tagging strategy and know exactly what's going on". Definitions and examples on the 3 divisions (cost group, feature, product) would also be helpful.

* There are no in-app definitions and examples for the different cost options (real cost, billed cost). I know them from talking with their team a lot and the views work fine, but this was not immediately clear. How credits, discounts, and support factors in is also unclear (though I understand this is being addressed)

* I use KMS keys a lot, but given their cryptic names I feel I need more context. Unlike many other resources, keys do not seem to have the context like relationships that I would need to identify what they are supporting. There are occasionally resources like this that are hard to track down.

* AWS is notorious for doing weird things with resource names, like putting instance name in a tag and key aliases in a separate resource. CloudZero could probably benefit from navigating some of these rules and showing the friendliest name possible for a resource. This would be especially helpful for things like large fleets of instances. Right now, the cost explorer contains a mix of easy-to-identify resources with incomprehensible ones and that makes discovery somewhat difficult. However it's still a lot better than using other tools!

* Relationship links are not bidirectional when you are drilled-down into a resource. This leads to potential blind spots where you can only see what's connected to what if you pick the right resource to look at.

* There's only a limited ability to drill into the cost explorer and uncover what's behind a "long tail". In a lot of cases I will see the top 5 taking up 20% of the total cost, with 80% being "other". Really unpacking what "other" contains is a bit more work than it needs to be IMO. There are no "negation" filters, where I could say "show me everything except these things I already know about"

* CloudZero has limited options for integration with your auth provider. Would be nice if it supported GSuite. There are also occasional glitches with signin - nothing a page refresh can't fix, but somewhat annoying.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

* CloudZero is invaluable for running high-scale serverless applications. In such applications, it is very easy to release a new feature that costs too much, especially if you are moving fast and experimenting. This danger can be kept to a minimum.

* Getting a legacy AWS account under control. You all know these accounts - full of dead experiments, overprovisioned untagged instances, mystery buckets. CloudZero helps you inventory and trim the fat.

* Identifying and managing elastic infrastructure, from serverless to auto-scaling groups and everything in between. This has helped us manage multiple environments supporting 20+ engineers and hundreds of customers.

What do you like best about the product?

Provides exposure to cost data very well to engineers with an intuitive interface and anomaly detection via Slack. We were able to quickly identify a number of areas to eliminate waste, and have caught more than a few changes that where simple changes to the application saved us thousands of dollars a month.

Since the application engineering teams have so much control of our cloud infrastructure costs and want to do the right thing giving them exposure to this data has let us do the 80/20 optimizations that significantly reduce our bill with minimal effort.

A small example was a refactoring of code that interacted with S3 for our Pages product. The new code was making GET requests where only HEAD requests were needed. CloudZero reported a cost anomaly within a day of deployment and it was seen and fixed by the team that owned the service the following day. The feedback cycle was quick enough that the code was still top of mind for the engineer, so we ended up with very little wasted spend and the fix was fast to implement.

What do you dislike about the product?

The platform doesn't have support for GCP, which we also use and could use similar tooling for.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Providing transparency into AWS costs and helping us reduce them with minimal effort and cross team coordination.

Getting cost data closer to the employees that are making the decisions that impact it. The cost impact of changes for workloads that have moved from colocation facilities to AWS are largely controlled by the application development team, not the infrastructure team.

What do you like best about the product?

The anomaly detection and alerting puts it way ahead of their competitors. The UI is straightforward and they're willing to take and respond to input from their customers.

What do you dislike about the product?

No Google Cloud support. UI is sometimes a little slow but still much faster than the competition.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We've been able to identify some inefficiency in how we were using S3 buckets and where we were sending some of our network traffic and saved a bunch of money.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

CloudZero offers features their competitors don't and provides a much more pleasant user experience.

What do you like best about the product?

Cloudzero has a simple UI with good slack / email integration that lets you get relevant data quickly. Anomaly detection is useful and promising (though it can be somewhat noisy), and when combined with weekly reports can help teams notice cost increases and lets development teams manage the costs of their own infrastructure, which can help find software problems in addition to controlling overhead. Product support from Cloudzero is great, and features keep coming.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are some limits to reporting timeframes, comparing one year to the prior would be useful. There are a number of manual steps for setup/on-boarding that are not in the UI yet (its on the roadmap), so customer support is needed to get set up and make some changes in cost allocation.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

CloudZero lets us monitor costs per product area and provide that data directly to engineering teams, in addition to providing aggregated data. Notifications ensure that changes affecting costs are intentional, and help us decide where to work to optimize spend.

What do you like best about the product?

The intuitiveness of the drilldowns and visualizations. I don't think in spreadsheets, so that's very useful for me.

What do you dislike about the product?

I'm an SRE. Getting all of our AWS resources tagged so that CZ categorized them properly took a really long time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're tracking costs across a rapidly-growing, all-engineers-can-add-resources-to-AWS-any-time startup. Cost control is important to us, but we only have so many hands to do the work. CZ helps us figure out where cost control work is going to be the most effective versus where we could spend the time better on other things.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that I can drill down. We have different cost targets per SKU, and CloudZero let's see how my team is doing at a high level, then drill into various products and further into the technologies that drive our spend.

What do you dislike about the product?

It seems to require a lot of behind the scenes customization. I'm not entirely sure how to customize the tool (e.g., update AWS tag mappings), though this is likely just a training issue.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I have been able to find the most expensive services I support and find the primary cost drivers. This helps me identify future areas of development and highlight risks in a quantifiable way to stakeholders.