Top 20 Cloud Cost Monitoring Tools In 2024

‍In today's digital age, businesses are increasingly moving their operations to the cloud to maximize their scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. However, keeping track of cloud costs can become daunting as organizations scale their cloud infrastructure. This is where cloud cost monitoring tools come into play. 

These tools help track and optimize cloud spending, identify cost-saving opportunities, and ensure you get the most value from your cloud investments. This blog has compiled a list of the top 20 cloud cost monitoring tools, with each tool focusing on various aspects of cloud cost monitoring.

Introduction To Cloud Cost Monitoring

Cloud cost monitoring refers to the process of tracking and analyzing the expenses associated with using cloud computing services, such as those provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and others.

Cloud services typically operate on a pay-as-you-go model, where users are billed based on the resources they consume, such as virtual machines, storage, bandwidth, and additional services like databases and AI tools. While cloud computing offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, it's essential for organizations to monitor their cloud spending to avoid unexpected expenses and optimize resource usage.

As you may be aware, cloud service providers typically charge for the provision of storage space. According to a report by Virtana, 94% of IT teams have observed an increase in their cloud storage costs. Alarmingly, 54% of them note that their expenditure on cloud storage is rising faster than the overall cost of cloud services.

This upward trend in costs can largely be attributed to overprovisioning, wherein businesses opt to pay for more extensive storage than necessary for their workloads. Overprovisioning is often chosen due to the complexity of right-sizing cloud storage, which can lead to downtime and damage to the business's reputation.

Addressing overprovisioning necessitates specialized tools and technologies capable of managing storage expansion or shrinkage without causing downtime. While various cloud cost monitoring tools are available, many primarily focus on compute resources. However, achieving maximum cost savings on the cloud requires tools that also prioritize storage resources. Therefore, there's a growing need to adopt multiple tools that provide comprehensive visibility into the cloud infrastructure, covering both compute and storage aspects.

Recognizing this need, we've curated a list of 20 cloud cost monitoring tools with diverse features and functionalities catering to different business perspectives. These tools are designed to offer holistic management of the entire cloud infrastructure, ensuring efficient resource utilization and cost optimization.

Top 20 Cloud Cost Monitoring Tools

We've compiled a list of the top 20 cloud cost monitoring tools that will help businesses track, analyze, and optimize cloud spending. It will help organizations make informed decisions and maximize their cloud investments.

1. Lucidity 

Lucidity stands out as a leading cloud cost optimization tool, specializing in helping businesses optimize their block storage costs. Trusted by numerous Fortune 500 companies, such as SpartanNash and American Airlines, Lucidity has proven to be instrumental in significantly reducing cloud spending.

At the core of Lucidity's offerings are its storage audit and block storage auto-scaler features. These tools seamlessly integrate with existing cloud infrastructure, enabling businesses to optimize their cloud costs without experiencing downtime. Unlike manual processes, which are often tedious and time-consuming and carry a risk of downtime, Lucidity's NoOps solution eliminates these challenges, significantly reducing the burden on DevOps teams.

By automating the optimization of block storage, Lucidity empowers businesses to achieve cost savings without compromising on performance or reliability. Its ability to streamline cloud cost management processes makes it an indispensable tool for organizations looking to maximize the value of their cloud investments.

With Lucidity, you can tackle challenges that organizations face while managing storage manually:

• Downtime: A sudden increase in workload can cause downtime, leading to more effort from DevOps teams. Also, enterprises often ignore enabling monitoring agents or setting alerts that cause delays in further actions. But with Lucidity, shrinkage and expansion happen seamlessly without any performance issues.  
• Manual block storage management: Manual block storage management is daunting and has space for significant errors. For example, in AWS, EBS shrinkage manually requires 7 steps, such as backing up the data, creating a new volume, etc. This directly means wasting significant time, which can have an impact on performance and productivity. 

How does Lucidity work?

Lucidity operates by addressing the challenges organizations encounter during their transition from on-premise to cloud environments, typically employing a lift-and-shift strategy. This approach often results in issues such as unused, underused, or overused storage, leading to inefficient resource utilization and potential over- or under-provisioning.

Traditional methods of cost monitoring may fail to effectively optimize resources, resulting in wastage or underutilization. Consequently, enterprises may struggle with over- or under-provisioning, risking performance degradation and increased costs.

Lucidity's storage audit and auto-scaler functionalities offer a solution to these challenges. The auto-scaler feature can be easily implemented in just three clicks, enabling organizations to dynamically adjust block storage in real-time based on workload demands. This automated process ensures seamless expansion or shrinkage of storage resources, optimizing resource allocation and mitigating the risks associated with over- or under-provisioning. By automating these tasks, Lucidity empowers organizations to enhance efficiency, minimize costs, and maintain optimal performance levels in their cloud environments.

Lucidity's Block Storage Auto-Scaler is designed to swiftly adjust storage capacity to ensure optimal cost-efficiency and high-performance levels, regardless of how rapidly your storage needs fluctuate.

Our Lucidity solution is engineered to minimize CPU and RAM usage, prioritizing instance stability and workload performance. The Lucidity agent consumes 2% or less of CPU and RAM resources, ensuring minimal impact on system resources while effectively managing block storage administration from onboarding onwards.

Additionally, Lucidity offers flexibility in deployment with three options: Self-hosted, Lucidity-hosted, and Private Link. This versatility enables organizations to choose the deployment method that best suits their infrastructure and security requirements, ensuring seamless integration and operation within their environment.

All these processes start just after Lucidity does the audit part. We conduct a comprehensive storage audit to know about the present storage plans. This audit report further assists in knowing the potential saving areas. 

Wondering what’s different with Lucidity’s storage audit tool?

Lucidity's storage audit tool sets itself apart by offering an easy-to-use automated solution for comprehensive analysis of block storage. Unlike manual discovery methods or monitoring tools, it streamlines the process and provides detailed insights into cloud costs, enabling users to identify potential areas for savings.

Key features of Lucidity's storage audit tool include:

• Disk health analysis: Lucidity conducts a thorough analysis of disk performance and usage, providing deep insights into resource utilization. This empowers organizations to optimize expenditures by using resources more efficiently and effectively.
• Downtime prevention: Traditional methods of managing storage require manual intervention, which can lead to downtime and performance issues. Lucidity's No-Ops disk auto-scaler eliminates this risk by enabling seamless shrinkage and expansion of storage capacity without impacting performance..  

Following the audit process, integrating your cloud infrastructure with Lucidity is quick and straightforward, typically taking only 15 minutes to complete.

Excited to know what happens once we deploy Lucidity; keep reading!

Based on the fetched audit report, an agent-based architecture is implemented on EC2 instances. The agents perform two significant tasks:

• Gather various storage metrics, such as volume, burst, queue, latency, IOPS, etc., and feed them to the auto-scaler. 
• The autoscaler analyzes the workload utilization and accordingly tunes the storage provision with expand and shrink operation.

Benefits of Lucidity

Some of the major benefits that Lucidity offers:

• No Downtime: Lucidity's auto-scaler ensures uninterrupted operation during cloud maintenance or storage optimization, even during sudden increases or decreases in workload. This eliminates downtime and latency spikes, ensuring continuous availability of services.

• Live Shrinkage and Expansion: Automated expansion or shrinking of disk utilization without human intervention frees up DevOps teams to focus on high-value tasks, optimizing productivity and resource allocation without wasting time and resources on manual processes.
• Reduces block storage up to 70%: Lucidity's auto-scaler helps reduce block storage costs by up to 70%. By optimizing resource utilization and eliminating unnecessary storage expenses for underused resources, organizations can achieve significant cost savings. 

Additionally, Lucidity offers an ROI calculator to estimate potential savings on cloud cost management with Azure, AWS, or GCP after implementing Lucidity's auto-scaler. Using this tool is simple: just specify the service provider, input your disk spend (either yearly or monthly), indicate your disk usage, and provide the annual growth rate of the disk.

With these inputs, the ROI calculator generates an estimate of the savings achievable with Lucidity's auto-scaler integrated into your system. This feature empowers organizations to make informed decisions about implementing Lucidity and demonstrates the potential cost-saving benefits of utilizing the auto-scaler for cloud infrastructure management.

2. Datadog

Datadog stands out as a comprehensive multi-cloud cost monitoring solution, offering robust support for various cloud cost control and optimization functionalities. With Datadog, users gain the ability to accurately clarify cloud costs at the resource level, providing detailed insights across Azure and AWS environments.

One of Datadog's key features is its capability to allocate cloud costs by service, product, or team, facilitating better cost allocation and accountability within organizations. Moreover, Datadog incorporates default cost validation features, ensuring the implementation of cost-effective solutions with high data accuracy.

In essence, Datadog empowers users to effectively manage and optimize cloud costs across multiple cloud environments, providing granular visibility and control to drive efficient resource utilization and cost savings.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.3/5

3. Densify

Also known as Intel Cost Optimizer powered by Densify, is a specialized tool designed to optimize Kubernetes resources automatically. This innovative solution enables users to configure cloud instances and leverage resource allocation and resizing functionalities to ensure cost-effectiveness in cloud deployments.

With its continuous monitoring and analysis capabilities, Intel Cost Optimizer identifies potential areas for cost optimization by scrutinizing resource usage and identifying opportunities to trim unnecessary expenses. Leveraging machine learning capabilities, the Densify platform delves deep into cloud-provider capabilities and workload elements, providing advanced insights to drive efficient resource utilization and cost savings. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.6/5

4. Azure Cost Management

Microsoft Suite provides  Azure Cost Management, a powerful cloud cost monitoring tool that enables enterprises to effectively monitor and optimize their cloud spending. It enhances visibility and accountability by providing customers with insights into their cloud usage and spending patterns.

Through the Azure portal, customers can easily monitor their cloud usage and access detailed reports to track spending trends over time. One of the standout features of Azure Cost Management is its ability to offer customized cost optimization suggestions through Azure advisors. This personalized approach helps organizations identify opportunities to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Furthermore, Azure Cost Management seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Power BI connectors and APIs for cost management, enabling customers to leverage personalized approaches and gain deeper insights into their cloud spending data. This integration enhances flexibility and enables organizations to tailor their cost management strategies to meet their specific needs and objectives.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 3.9/5

5. Virtana Optimize

Formerly known as Metricly, now acquired by Virtana, Virtana Optimize is a cloud optimization tool with expertise in simplifying the monitoring and optimization process. It allows users tocan easily identify unutilized resources and analyze reports of resource usage and the cost involved. 

Virtana supports advanced solutions to get efficient results and manage various applications in different cloud environments. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.8/5

6. Harness Cost Management

Harness is a CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery)--based platform that lets you control cloud costs with its intelligent automation capabilities. You can automate the process and save around 70% of the cloud bill with detailed unit-level cloud cost insights. 

With Harness cost management, you can monitor the utilization of data, utilized, idle, and unallocated resources. It also supports cost anomaly detection and alert features to let you handle potentially expensive activities. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.6/5

7. Apptio Cloudability

Cloudability by Apptio (An IBM company) is a cost-monitoring tool that assists finance, IT, and business teams optimize cloud spending. With its centralized dashboard, you can get a unified view of expenses by gathering data from multiple cloud resources. 

It supports rightsizing capabilities to lessen operating expenses and save funds for further investments. In addition, it offers budgeting and forecasting capabilities through its financial management solutions. The best part is that Cloudbility can be nicely integrated with other cloud-monitoring platforms like Datadog and PageDuty to get deeper insights. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.2/5

8. Apache Cloudstack

The next considerable option for a cloud cost monitoring tool is Apache Cloudstack, an open-source IaaS. It supports a multi-hypervisor environment to handle tasks like billing and metering. Cloudstack can integrate with your existing infrastructure to reduce the time and cost of supporting a multi-tenant IaaS platform. 

You can manage large networks of virtual machines and their cost-management elements. Although CloudStack provides extensive features for managing cloud expenses, its resource-intensive setup and maintenance may present a learning curve for novice users. 

Customer Rating 

•  G2 - 4.4/5

9. CloudZero

If you are looking for an intelligent platform to monitor cloud costs, CloudZero can be the one. It helps enterprises better understand their expenses and resource allocations. Regardless of business size, CloudZero can assist businesses in making cloud cost-related decisions. 

It has features like Slack alerts and automated tagging to monitor and attribute cloud costs to teams, product features, customers, etc. Moreover, CloudZero also provides saving suggestions to enhance productivity and margin. With its cost anomaly alert feature, one can easily prevent overexpenses and cost surprises. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.6/5

10. Cast AI

Backed with AI capabilities, Cast AI is one of the leading Kubernet automation and cloud cost monitoring tools. It assists in keeping the configuration minimal in real-time by continuously monitoring the clusters. As your clusters are tracked in real-time, they are well-optimized for features like bin packing, provisioning, and auto-scaling to lessen the cloud cost. 

The best part about Cast AI is the non-intervention of humans to produce seamless results. With it, businesses can easily manage their cloud spending for optimal resource usage and cost efficiency. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.8/5

11. Spot by NetApp

Formerly known as Spot.io or Spotinst, Spot by NetApp uses spot instance automation to monitor and optimize cloud costs. It automatically allocates spot capacity for workloads to cut the extra cost and ensure high availability. 

The platform uses regular optimization and automation to give detailed insights into minimizing the cloud cost investment. A helpful rightsizing recommendation mechanism built into Spot by NetApp allows teams to monitor workload utilization in real-time and receive advice for manually changing resource requirements. This makes faster implementation and high-level visualization possible. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.8/5

12. Turbonomic by IBM

Another AI-powered cloud cost monitoring solution is Turbonomic by IBM. It has various cloud automation capabilities to optimize cloud services, which results in significantly reducing cloud expenses. You can track and optimize the cost of cloud-native, on-premises, and hybrid cloud software. 

It automates actions in real time to efficiently utilize compute, network, and storage resources at each layer of the stack. The platform has full-stack integrated graphics to monitor demand and cost across the application. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.5/5

13. CloudHealth

CloudHealth by VMWare has a unified interface to manage usage, performance, security, and cloud costs. With this, enterprises can optimize the infrastructure to remove any wastage in spending without harming performance metrics. CloudHealth offers multi-cloud capabilities as well. 

Its automated cost optimization feature identifies and removes unutilized resources, provides cost-saving suggestions, and does cost optimization automatically. Its capability to monitor cloud usage patterns gives tailored recommendations to lighten your pocket. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.1/5

14. Flexera One

Another pick for cloud cost monitoring is Flexera One, a SaaS-based multi-cloud cost optimization solution. With Flexera One, businesses can even explore a complicated cloud environment. Its inclusive visualization capabilities help the company gain data-driven insights and make decisions. 

Moreover, it is based on Machine Learning algorithms that can accurately forecast expenses.  Flexera offers personalized recommendations for resizing instances, reserved instances, and more affordable service options. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 3.7/5

15. Nutanix

Formerly known as Beam, Nutanix is a multi-cloud IaaS framework that can give detailed insights into IT resource consumption with a self-service portal. One can also monitor installations on private cloud machines (hosted on-premises). 

Nutanix offers budget tracking, discount management, and automated rightsizing capabilities. You can even set automated cost anomaly alerts to make timely decisions. To meet your price performance goal, you can utilize its cloud manager to operate, automate, and optimize the infrastructure. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.6/5

16. Zesty

Zesty is another AI-backed cloud cost monitoring solution that has been trained enough for both simulated and actual cloud consumption data. It is well capable of forecasting accurate cloud resources utilized by applications in real time. Such predictive analytics help Zesty perform automated actions, like scaling up or down, resizing, or altering storage volumes. 

It optimizes expenditures by dynamically reducing or increasing your disc capacity (Zesty Disc) to match usage requirements. By now, the tool only covers EC2 instances. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.8/5

17. Morpheus

Morpheus cloud cost monitoring and optimization is another analytical tool customized for FinOps teams to manage hybrid cloud costs. By integrating with cloud platforms or hypervisors, you can enable advanced automation, meticulous logging, and accurate analytics. 

This guarantees accurate tracking of cloud spending and consumption trends, as the platform constantly synchronizes with public cloud pricing, accounting for various currencies and price modifications. Morpheus can be well integrated with already existing IT management tools to smooth out the cloud cost monitoring workflow. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.8/5

18. Granulate

Granulate is an AI-powered cloud observation and optimization solution that prioritizes infrastructure utilization and application performance optimization. Ituses machine learning and real-time data to deliver actionable insights and suggestions that help businesses manage and control cloud expenses while enhancing application performance.

With such insights, businesses can make informed decisions to optimize cloud resource utilization, thus making cost-effective decisions. Overall, Granulate helps to get optimal performance in various cloud environments. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 5/5

19. Yotascale

Another option is Yotascale, which is a multi-cloud cost monitoring tool, specially designed to manage cloud cost dynamics and complex environments. Yotscale can present cloud spending by team, product, or service. You can use capabilities like automated cost allocation, unutilized resource discovery, rightsizing recommendations, commitment discount management, etc. 

Moreover, Yotascale recently announced Yota AI assist, a Gen-AI assistant to help you know more about cloud costs. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.6/5

20. FinOut

Last but not least, FinOut stands out as an advanced cloud cost monitoring tool as it helps to manage, allocate, and reduce cloud spend across various cloud services. You can get detailed insights on cost management per center. 

It empowers you to fully utilize the resources across the whole infrastructure, which in turn helps identify inefficiencies. Consequently, it provides detailed reports to make data-driven decisions. This ensures resources are being utilized optimally and the budget is aligned with organizational objectives. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.6/5

Monitor your Cloud Cost Efficiently!

Efficiently monitoring cloud costs is essential for businesses to manage their spending, optimize costs, and achieve better financial outcomes. The top cloud cost monitoring tools mentioned above offer a range of features and capabilities tailored to meet these needs. Whether your organization utilizes AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud or operates in a multi-cloud environment, a tool from this list can provide the necessary insights to take control of cloud costs and maximize the value of investments.

By leveraging the right cloud cost monitoring tool, businesses gain greater cost transparency, enabling them to make informed decisions about cloud spending. This, in turn, leads to improved bottom-line results and enhanced ROI on cloud investments.

To prevent cloud costs from spiraling out of control, it's crucial to implement a robust cloud cost monitoring solution. Consider adopting any of these top cloud cost monitoring tools to optimize cloud costs effectively and drive financial efficiency across your organization.

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