Visibility is the first step toward cloud efficiency
Cloud cost visibility refers to the process of performing detailed analyses of various costs of applications, resources, and infrastructure on cloud services.
This will involve leveraging data obtained from cloud spending to drive insights into how you utilize your cloud resources and the costs incurred in the process.
Cloud Cost Visibility means getting a clear picture of where your cloud money is going—across compute, storage, networking, databases, containers, and SaaS services.
Although it is very important to keep in mind that cloud cost visibility is not just about making information available; rather, it's about how that information is accessed and insights are drawn from it. The more organized the data is, the easier it will be to attain visibility.
- Monitor cloud costs in a single, unified view
- Use Smart Tagging to connect spending with business context
- Surface waste and underutilization before it becomes a problem
- Empower finance and operational teams to make decisions with confidence.
Free Cloud Cost Management Tools
- AWS Billing and Cost Management
- AWS Compute Optimizer
- Azure Cost Management
- Azure Trusted Advisor
On-Premises Cost Visibility Tools
- Prometheus + Grafana
- Zabbix
- Nagios
- SolarWinds
- Datadog
- New Relic
- Elastic Stack (ELK)
- Azure Monitor / AWS CloudWatch (Cloud)
Dashboards & Visualization Tools
- Power BI
- Tableau
- Grafana
- Google Data Studio
Dashboards Usually Show
Typical widgets in cloud cost visibility dashboards:
📊 Daily/Monthly cloud spend
💡 Forecasted next month spend
🏷️ Cost by tag (team, project, app)
📉 Idle or waste resources
🏷️ Tag compliance percentage
🎯 Reserved Instance / Savings Plan utilization
⚠️ Cost anomalies / alerts
🏢 Business-unit level cost allocation
Read more Cloud Cost Management Tools
You don’t reduce cloud spend with tools. You reduce it with visibility + action
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