What Are the Best Tools for Monitoring Cloud Costs?

From my perspective, a major drawback with many third-party cost platforms is that they show you your overspending but don’t allow you to take immediate actions. For a mid-sized company, the ideal setup should include automated governance that can quickly identify and terminate orphaned resources or misconfigured environments. When evaluating tools, look for auto-remediation features. Doing manual adjustments at scale is impractical.

CloudHealth was great until Broadcom acquired it and made it pretty difficult to navigate. Most users I know split into two main options based on their setup. If you need detailed cost allocation, Vantage or Apptio Cloudability are the way to go. Vantage offers excellent pre-built dashboards without the need for a dedicated FinOps team. For AWS users, the native Cost Explorer covers a lot of ground. However, often cost issues arise not just from the tools, but from untagged resources, development environments left running, or roles that allow teams to create resources without oversight. What cloud services are you using, and is the issue mainly about understanding costs or are you dealing with actual overspending?

I’ve been developing a tool focused on Azure with functionalities beyond just tracking costs. It schedules scans of your environment, logging changes over time to highlight any cost spikes. Plus, it gives helpful recommendations like identifying orphaned resources and optimizing VM size and access. It’s entirely self-hosted, keeping all data within your tenant, and I'm currently in beta. If anyone's interested in testing it out, feel free to check out my site!

If you're using GCP, a cool way to manage costs is to export all your logs to BigQuery and create a dashboard with Looker Studio. It’s a straightforward process! Just a heads up though, avoid connecting Gemini with BigQuery—it tends to give a lot of inaccurate data that can be frustrating.