* 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
* 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
42 out of 43 Total Reviews for CloudZero
Overall Review Sentiment for CloudZero
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Support for all of our major providers, from the infrastructure providers to major other services like Snowflake, Datadog, etc. Flexible reporting and alerting, stellar customer success managers. Its like having a great tool and second set of eyes on our spend. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Small company with immaturity in places, still learning, but listening and moving forward. Note this is minor and has much improved over the last couple years. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
CloudZero makes it easy for us to allocate costs and understand the spending for our Cloud environment (primary AWS). Additionally, it allows us to generate insights and clearly flag changes that are unexpected or resulting from architectural decisions. We are leveraging CloudZero mostly on the engineering level with our delivery teams, but we also use it as a financial support team to plan our costs and allow financial reconciliation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There are still some open points to integrating the discovered Insights into our processes, such as a Jira Integration allowing our Engineers to act on findings even faster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
CloudZero can give you an excellent view into your Cloud costs, enabling you the flexibility to cut up complex infrastructure into buckets that make sense for your use case.
The ability to quickly integrate multiple Cloud Providers into the tool gives an amazing single pane of glass. This allows for easy comparison between spend changes across multiple vectors.
Asside from the software itself, the access you gain to a FinOps Account manager has been great. Having an expert from the CloudZero side to support in configuration and troubleshoot problems enables things to get sorted quickly - ultimately improving the experience for internal customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Where I think they can improve is arround some of their reporting functionality. In part, this is the overall management of those alerts including configuration and dissmissal but also the depth of information they provide. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Easy interface. Ability to integrate over 50+ telemetries and allocation for our org. Great self-service dashboard capabilities. Unlocking cost transparency at the ressource level makes it accessible from C-Level to engineer and is the key piece to enable FinOps throughout the organization. Great customer support team, post sales and constant product evolution is amazing! Implementation was very easy even given our highly complex telemetries for shared cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We used to have some latencies in loading dashboards and explorer views, but this has been fixed several months ago. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Product
- Slack alerts on anomalies
- Slack alerts on spend till date
- Dimensions and tags helps us clean up the mess we have in AWS
- Breakdown of Cost Type view
- Budgets
Service
- Strong engagement from the Customer Service team helps keep cost monitoring a priority
- Always been responsive on Slack for any questions/requests Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
UI feels a bit clunky, but it's not a big pain point for a tool I do not use every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The attribution model (cost-formation) is really powerful (without being too complex). It's helped us to allocate cost at various levels of the organisation. This in combination with the great UI enables infrequent users to quickly see what they are spending. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The forecasting side of the tool is pretty limited it would be great to see this evolve especially through the use of AI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
CloudZero's Kubernetes cost reporting is accurate and very helpful to show engineering teams their share of cluster costs.
Cost Formation allows you to version dimensions/datasets. In addition, I can create dimensions much faster by defining the dimension in YAML.
CloudZero seems much more intuitive to use than other cloud cost platforms
The views are not as busy as other cost reporting platforms making it easier to read/use Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
They need to improve their UX. I would like to add users via an API call.
We would like to see usage in gigabytes with costs for certain AWS services as well as for New Relic costs.
They need to improve their budgets so you can sort and filter Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
CloudZero always listen, learn and grow their product. We often mention an idea and sooner after its a feature. The platform is so fast and intuitive we have been able to get really useful data into the hands of engineers with zero problems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I find it hard to find anything to dislike Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
From initial POC to implementation to the savings found, the account team and the tool delivers significant value, driving accountability across multiple personas of your Cloud Seevice Provider spend, additionally, connectors provide meaningful insight to other consumption saas spend Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
None to speak of that are meaningful based upon our usage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
CloudZero has been great since day 1. Y'all nail ease of use, implementation, customer support (pre and post sales), and is a fantastic platform for FinOps. We have over 358 users now too. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Insights platform has a lot of work to do be done Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
