CloudZero Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform

I have used CloudZero  in a multi-cloud fashion, connecting to various public cloud environments in order to observe costs and then generate reports, dashboards, cost anomalies, and everything cloud FinOps related.

I have used CloudZero  to generate reports to look at costs within specific cloud accounts, and one way in which it can help is if there's a cost anomaly within a specific cloud account. I have looked at the costs across a period of days to identify when it occurred and for which resources it occurred, which enabled drilling down into exactly why that occurred, driving cost reduction.

The main use case is to build reports, but I have also used it, and my team has used it, to build out dashboards over long periods, looking at maybe Kubernetes  cluster insights, setting budgets, and working out shared cost allocation. There are many features within CloudZero that have allowed us to use it in a variety of ways.

The best features of CloudZero, in my opinion, are their reporting capabilities, their right-sizing capabilities for compute instances, their asset inventory feature, and their dashboard functionality.

Probably the dashboard feature stands out most because it allows bringing together lots of different widgets to look at lots of different types of costs across different cloud accounts, allowing me to look at many pieces of data within one screen, which is very useful to refer to.

With CloudZero being a FinOps tool, it allows looking at cloud costs from a variety of vendors from many different cloud accounts. Within our organization, it has been beneficial because we are able to take costs from loads of different cloud endpoints and then make those costs more efficient, effectively helping us to reduce the costs that we spend, which is great for the business.

I don't know how much money specifically we have saved, but CloudZero has definitely helped us with cost savings the more we use it, and it allows for better data visibility, which is invaluable in the modern workplace, especially in highly technical and tech-driven companies such as ours.

In terms of improvements for CloudZero, I felt there could be potential improvements in their budget section. I have used other tools before where the budget feature is a little easier to use in terms of the UI. I also found updating their business mappings quite difficult. When I first started using the tool, one of the first things demonstrated was a YAML config file that was thousands of lines long, which had to be updated and pushed for changes to occur within CloudZero. I would like a feature where you could update elements directly through the UI, as I understand they plan to bring that into the tool at a future date, since using that long YAML file can be very difficult and lead to errors.

Although CloudZero's reporting feature is very good, I feel I have used tools that have more feature-rich qualities for their reporting features than CloudZero, which could be something valuable considering their reporting feature is also popular.

I have used CloudZero for around several months, maybe just under a year.

CloudZero is very stable. I did not notice any issues with technical instability, and I can see that it scales with a large number of cloud accounts, which is impressive.

CloudZero's scalability is good. It can definitely scale to hundreds and hundreds of cloud accounts, and I imagine it can scale into the thousands as well. I have no complaints there.

The customer support from CloudZero is great. We have interacted with a few individuals from the company and have no complaints. They were brilliant, and I really enjoyed working with them.

We have used various FinOps tools within the organization, primarily the native public cloud tools. Within AWS , GCP, and Azure , they have their own FinOps tools, which were good, but since they are specific to the clouds, we had to use numerous tools at once rather than a single tool like CloudZero, which acts as a one-stop shop for aggregating all of that data.

I thought the cost for CloudZero was reasonable for the tool, and the CloudZero team was interested in making it a reasonable cost as well, in terms of what we were looking for. The setup was quite seamless with them because we would meet regularly, and their initial support was very good. I definitely enjoyed that phase.

We did not evaluate other options at the same time. We were more focused on whether to continue using the cloud-native tools within the public clouds or look for a multi-cloud tool like CloudZero. Between the two, using a multi-cloud tool has definitely provided many benefits that the cloud-native tools did not.

I rate CloudZero as nine out of ten. It is a very strong tool, and I definitely enjoy using it. I can see how it can drive cost savings and benefits for all of their customers, but there are areas for improvement just as with any tool, though there are not any standout limitations to using it, making it very strong.

I chose nine out of ten because there are some areas for improvement with CloudZero. They are very minor, and there is nothing that breaks functionality or usage. The main reason is that long YAML config file which requires thousands of lines of coding and editing, and if that were not the case, it might be a ten out of ten if I could edit directly through the UI.

I do not think there are any improvements needed for CloudZero that I have not already mentioned. It is largely just the YAML file related section and a couple of other minor improvements, but nothing large or glaring. It is a very good tool.

I cannot share specific business metrics due to data sensitivity, but I can definitely say that CloudZero can save cloud costs. It is feature-rich in terms of reporting and dashboards, and its cost anomaly aspect can help if costs ever skyrocket. I would highly recommend it to other companies looking to make their cloud costs more efficient or reduce them.

I would recommend others to use CloudZero because it is a brilliant tool, and to engage their support staff throughout the setup journey, as they are definitely experts and very helpful.

CloudZero is a great tool. I have definitely enjoyed using it and have seen business benefits from it, so I am very happy with the tool. I rate this review as nine out of ten.