Slowly but surely your monthly Cloud bill is climbing. If the increase is releated to more customers and more business opportunity with a good ROI, that’s great! Congratulations! However, what if it is related to an untidy state of affairs in your cloud house, and unused, unoptimised cloud resources is wasting company money? Well, that’s very bad! How can you tell the difference?

Read on below and find out in this week’s episode!

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The Cloud Clinic is a series on the #AzureEnablementShow where we focus on answering caller questions about using the cloud. It is difficult to start out right, and it is difficult to stay on an optimal path in the cloud journey. "I thought the cloud would be better than this, but I have some questions!" This is the show where you can have Your question answered! Please reach out to me on social channels, or comment here, or on YouTube, and we might be answering Your Cloud Clinic Question next!

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We are in the Cloud spending money; how do we know we are getting business value from what we are paying for?

Please enjoy this episode on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB4XAKIh2eQ]

Here is the episode on Microsoft Learn:

[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/azure-enablement/the-cloud-clinic-making-sure-youre-getting-full-value-from-your-cloud-spend]

Are you sure you are spending on the right things?

As noted in the intro you MUST know, when you are spending a significant amount of company money on running resources in the cloud, that you are spending the money in the right places! Technically that means you need to add cost management tags to your resources, but that part is just mechanics, and as such it is not very interesting.

What is more important is that you understand in the business what you are willing to spend money on in the cloud! Here is where an experienced technical cloud person will come in handy. This person needs to be a universal translator between businesspeople (normal people, or muggles – as in non-magical/non-technical folks) and tech people (wizards or geeks).

Find out what the business needs, and then make sure you are using the right and appropriate cloud resources for the job! Re-examining your Azure spend on a routine basis helps to ensure that you’re spending wisely. Next…

Find out how to technically measure the right things from the Cloud resources

All cloud resources that cost money for your company can have their performance metrics and cost data collected. Are you using the right resources, but also, are you using them appropriately? Obvious issues such as incorrectly sized machines or incorrectly scaled clusters can spend a lot of money and provide very little value.

Consider using Cloud native tooling to collect the right cost data

In Azure I would personally recommend Azure Monitor. It is a unified and comprehensive monitoring solution for your cloud and on-premises environments. But, hey! If you want to use another tool, knock yourself out! All cost data collected in Azure is Your Data! If you want to take that data and export it to any other analysis service, you are completely free to do so! There is great advantage in using the native tooling of your cloud provider because it is both purpose-built and fully integrated into the offering. This is, again in my opinion, perhaps not the first place where you want to get “creative” or “exotic” in your tool choices.

If your company is not yet well versed in Azure Monitor, this is probably one of the best pieces of advice you can get on your road to the cloud: Invest in your whole team, certainly technical staff, but also business people, and financial operations, to learn what Azure Monitor can do for you!

Make available to business owners a live dashboard of real valuable cost data!

You have business running in the cloud. You have resources deployed. You have tagged them appropriately. The consumption is incurring cost. You collect both performance data and cost data. OK, so far so good!

One critical piece remains – to use the data to perform intelligent analysis and investigate the cost. You need to set up an empowering, live, and useful dashboard that shows what is going on with cost over time! For example, using Azure Dashboards for the more technical and project managers, and using PowerBI for businesspeople. Get started by skilling your technical team then creating a performance dashboard!

Good luck on your path to true wisdom in cloud spend!