So You’ve Joined This New-fangled Thing Called The Cloud

You’re hip, you’re cool. You’re… hoping this isn’t more hassle than it’s worth.

Our architects have come across a lot of people in the same position. They want to take advantage of the flexibility, lower costs, and other benefits of the cloud but aren’t sure how to keep track of what’s going on in their environment and how to use this unfamiliar environment efficiently. To address this issue, we’ve worked for the past year to develop a service offering that will help our clients to gain visibility, manage cost, ensure security, and govern their environment in a cost-effective way.

Presenting: Anexinet Cloud Insights

We’ve partnered with the reporting platform CloudHealth to create a proactive reporting system that helps our clients manage their cloud environments. By combining CloudHealth’s software with Anexinet’s Cloud expertise, we analyze our client’s cloud usage and help them to gain visibility, manage cost, and govern their environment through recommendations.
 

What does this look like?

This service offering includes 2 major parts: the setup and the ongoing reporting.

The Setup

When a new client purchases Anexinet Cloud Insights, they are assigned a dedicated analyst who will help them through the setup process and will conduct the analysis and reporting of their environment. As part of the initial setup, one of our architects works with the client to setup or confirm a tagging system for their environment (usually by cost center or project). This tagging system allows us to customize our reporting to be as useful as possible to each client. The initial setup also includes a meeting with the client’s analyst to review the reports that they will be getting on an ongoing basis and to establish any custom parameters they would like to track. Once we ensure that the client will be getting the information that they will need to effectively manage their environment, the analyst will set up the automated weekly reports according to the client’s specifications.

Ongoing Reporting

Once set up, the client will begin to receive weekly and monthly reports within 2 weeks and will meet with their analyst every month to review the information provided, discuss the recommendations, and answer any questions they may have about their environment.

Weekly Reporting: Visibility and Cost Summary

The weekly reports have a focus of giving our client visibility into their environment. The Cost Summary report shows the client’s spend month to date, broken down by tag group and cloud service. The Cost Summary also projects the client’s spend out to the end of the month and compares that spend to the last month’s spend in each category. While this report shows the client their current and expected spend, the Health Check shows them possible ways to reduce that spend. The Health Check identifies unused and underutilized resources in the client’s environment that may be generating an unnecessary cost. The Health Check also provides governance and security analysis, identifying security risks in the environment and highlighting instances that have not been tagged correctly. Between these weekly reports, the client is given a complete view of their environment and can manage their resources effectively. If the client sees something they don’t expect, their analyst is readily available to look into their environment and identify how to mitigate any issues.

Monthly Reporting: Resource Analysis, Monthly Cost Summary, & Recommendations

For the monthly reports, Anexinet’s resource analyzes the client’s environment and finds the ‘why’ of changes in the client’s environment in the past month. The monthly Cost Summary breaks down the total cost for that month by tag group and analyses the major cost generators for any change in that month’s spend. This report also includes a roll-up excel spreadsheet that breaks the client’s invoice down by tag group and cloud service, allowing them to see exactly which of their resources are contributing cost to their monthly invoice. The Significant Changes report identifies any tag groups that experience a change in spend as well as the factors in each tag group that caused that change.
The monthly reports also use Anexinet’s cloud expertise to analyze the client’s environment to provide recommendations on how to best reduce their monthly spend. The Previous Generation report identifies any current resources that have a newer version and recommend the proper resource type to use in the new generation that will provide the best and cheapest service. The Aging Snapshot report tracks the number and age of snapshots in the client’s environment and identifies snapshots that may be candidates for deletion, reducing the monthly storage cost to keep them. The Reserved Instance Recommendations report provides the largest potential cost reduction, tracking the client’s current reserved instance usage and identifying resources that may benefit from a reserved instance purchase.

Example of Reporting Recommendations:

Summary

Between the weekly reports, monthly reports, and monthly meetings with their analyst, clients gain a clear ongoing knowledge of their environment and how to best manage their resources as efficiently as possible.