Cloud Billing and predictive analysis tools

The Cloud Billing report gives full cost analysis for cloud services consumed. Different reports such as Daily, Monthly and Yearly helps in analyzing consumption trends and helps in cost optimization. You can plan and assess the monthly, quarterly or annual budgeting requirement on cloud spend.

Multiple tools are available to help provide cross platform billing solutions for cloud

CloudCheckr ( https://cloudcheckr.com ):

CloudCheckr is a comprehensive cloud management solution, helping businesses manage and automate cost as well as security for their Azure, AWS and Google based public cloud environments . Below are the core functionalities

  • Cost and Expense Management – CloudCheckr provides cost allocation, spend optimization, invoicing and charge backs. Custom reports and alerts ensure governance and accountability as environments scale.
  • Security and Compliance – Total visibility across cloud infrastructure enables protection for state and activity monitoring, turning insight to action while meeting compliance demands.
  • Asset Management – Cross-account dashboards provide sophisticated reporting for enterprise-wide inventory based on tags, geography, function and more to proactively optimize workloads.
  • Resource Utilization – CloudCheckr provides summary and detailed usage statistics for resources across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, offering actionable intelligence to right-size and scale services efficiently.
  • Self-Healing Automation – CloudCheckr enables users to save money, time, and effort to increase operational efficiencies with automated actions for your cloud.

Cloudyn ( https://www.cloudyn.com/ ) :

Cloudyn, a Microsoft subsidiary ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management/overview ), allows you to track cloud usage and expenditures for your Azure resources and other cloud providers including AWS and Google. Easy-to-understand dashboard reports help with cost allocation and showbacks/chargebacks as well. Cloudyn helps optimize your cloud spending by identifying underutilized resources that you can then manage and adjust . Cloudyn provides following cost management reporting

  • Monitor usage and spending : Reports help you monitor spending to analyze and track cloud usage, costs, and trends. Using Over Time reports, you can detect anomalies that differ from normal trends. Inefficiencies in your cloud deployment are visible in optimization reports
  • Manage costs: Cost allocation manages costs by analyzing your costs based on your tagging policy. You can use tags on your custom accounts, resources, and entities to refine cost allocation. Alerting helps manage costs by notifying you automatically when unusual spending or overspending occurs
  • Improve efficiency: You can determine optimal VM usage and identify idle VMs or remove idle VMs and unattached disks with Cloudyn. Using information in Sizing Optimization and Inefficiency reports, you can create a plan to down-size or remove idle VMs

Embotics® vCommander® https://www.embotics.com/

vCommander is Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that enables cloud automation by integrating seamlessly with on-premise datacenters and public cloud infrastructure. vCommander orchestrates hybrid cloud provisioning and provides governance and cost optimization for both legacy and cloud-native applications. vCommander provides a single pane of glass by working in parallel with your existing public and private cloud infrastructure, including VMware vSphere, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft® Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes and Microsoft® Hyper-V SCVMM. Core functionalities of vCommander are

  • Service Request Automation – Self-service provisioning and management allow users to view and manage VMs, including the ability to request new VMs or request changes to existing VMs
  • Chargeback and IT Costing – vCommander assigns and tracks virtual asset costs in real time, with comprehensive reporting on virtual infrastructure costs and growth trends
  • Capacity and Performance – vCommander predicts and identifies constraining resources so that you can address bottlenecks before they happen
  • Lifecycle and Policy Management – vCommander’s robust policy engine automates VM lifecycle management, ensuring that VMs are decommissioned within set time limits. Flexible notification and expiry extension options ensure that users are well informed and able to keep VMs active for as long as they are needed
  • Search and Reports – vCommander delivers immediate value with best-practice virtual infrastructure reports, VM sprawl information, and capacity and growth indicators.

ORBITERA ( https://www.orbitera.com/billing/ )

The leading multi-cloud commerce solution, and see how it enables simple, seamless, and scalable buying and selling of software and services in the cloud. The core competencies are

  • Consumption or Subscription Billing: Quickly generate accurate, easy-to-read bills across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
  • Custom Pricebooks: Optimize margins with flexible payment models and customer-specific pricebooks. Define prices from single line items to entire pricebooks for each customer or customer tier with a single click.
  • Integrated Dashboard: Aggregate billing data across clouds and providers into a single-pane dashboard. Easily access and analyze detailed, user-level behavior and cloud cost information.
  • Third Party Cloud Integration: Accurately parse customer-level billing reports with complete integration of cloud infrastructure provider billing data. Orbitera supports Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink, IBM SoftLayer, Acronis, SingleHop, Intermedia and more.
  • Channel Management: Empower channel partners to manage and bill across multiple tiers of sellers

APPTIO ( https://www.apptio.com/ )

Provides cost optimization tools for Hybrid and Public Cloud. Apptio’s software uses machine learning to translate technology costs across the entire IT portfolio (including on-premises systems, vendors, projects, and cloud systems) into a holistic, business-centric view. Customers leverage this view to set future targets, measure business results and drive investment decisions.

  • Through a range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, Apptio gives IT access to the tools and dashboards needed to monitor various IT resources across increasingly complex cloud estates. This includes IT financial management, cloud cost management and vendor insights.
  • Get a single view of Hybrid IT and compare on-premise against cost in multiple cloud platforms
  • Take action on optimization recommendations across public cloud, private cost and on premises
  • Understand public cloud cost and usage to avoid surprises and avoid accountability
  • Manage IaaS and PaaS consumption by infra, app and business units to make better decisions