7 Reasons Engineering and DevOps Teams Love CloudZero

CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence solution that puts engineering in control of cloud cost. We set out to disrupt the cost management and optimization space by building a solution that was designed around the way engineers work — so cost becomes a tradeoff during the software development process, rather than a massive disruption.

We often get asked what actually makes us such an engineering-friendly solution?

Well, here are seven reasons why engineering and DevOps teams love CloudZero.

1. Engineers get a relevant view of the products and features they care about — without endless tagging exercises.

Telling a developer that the company spends a million dollars a year on EC2 doesn’t really help them make better decisions based on cost. If you want to build a culture of cost-consciousness and shift cloud cost optimization left — engineers need a relevant view of the products they’re working on.

CloudZero will automatically organize your cost into products, features, dev teams — or whatever metrics matter to you. Each team can have their own view of the features they’re working on, so they can understand how their costs are trending without getting distracted by metrics that don’t matter to them.

2. Our anomaly alerts automatically detect spikes in product features or dev teams.

If you’ve heard of CloudZero, you probably know that we’re known for our anomaly alerting. With CloudZero’s machine-learning driven anomaly alerting, you’ll never have to set a rule or alert threshold. They just — work.

The best part? We’re not just alerting you on total cost  — or even the cost of an AWS service, like Amazon S3 or ECS. We’ll alert you when the cost of one of your product features spikes, then send a notification only to the team responsible for it.

This means the next time the premium feature you only charge $4.99 a year for doubles in cost — you’ll know before it takes a bite out of your margins.

3. Hate noisy alerts? Us too.

Our anomaly alerts are never noisy. While the rate varies by company size and complexity, our customers rarely get more than one or two anomaly alerts per week.

You’ll also get a weekly round-up of how costs are changing — just as a friendly reminder about where you stand.

4. We make it super easy to drill down and/or zoom out.

The engineers we work with tell us that with other cost tools, it’s nearly impossible to traverse between high-level cost summaries and a single line item.

With CloudZero, you can click on just about anything to drill down and see what happened — or zoom out to understand how it’s contributing to trends. You don’t need to pull another report every time you want to understand why something changed.

This helps you get a granular understanding of your cost while you answer questions fast — so you can get back to work solving problems for your customers.

5. You can quickly send a Slack or email with a link to a particular view of your cost.

Sometimes it really is the simple things that delight customers. We often hear from engineers (especially now that everyone is remote) that they appreciate how CloudZero lets them quickly send a link to exactly what they want their colleagues to look at.

It’s a minor thing, but our customers love how easily it helps them collaborate and resolve questions.

6. We’ll correlate cost with events, like your deployments.

CloudZero can pull in events from other tools, such as GitHub, so you can correlate your cost with engineering activities that happen.

For example, in this view, you can see there was a deployment, followed by a cost spike.

The fourth bar is another deploy, then the issue was fixed. This is just another way we provide the context to help you investigate and resolve issues quickly.

You can also add any custom event marker, so you can see how your costs changed as a result of your big holiday sale or onboarding a huge enterprise customer.

7. We’re built more like an APM or observability tool than a cost tool.

Our secret sauce lies in our architecture — which is what enables us to provide more context than anyone else.

Most cost management and optimization tools look at billing data. We enrich billing data with context from AWS, plus other telemetry. This is the magic that helps you to explore and investigate — or measure metrics that are based on utilization metrics, like your cost per tenant.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can read up on how CloudZero was actually originally designed to be an observability solution.

Still Not Sold?

Read about how SeatGeek built a culture of cost-consciousness engineering with CloudZero.

Ready to see for yourself? Schedule a demo.