Public cloud IaaS is occupying a growing share of annual IT spending for organizations. Their commitment to management on cost savings /ROI needs to show results. IT Leaders responsible for IaaS budgets that are expected to grow must manage costs by harnessing cloud service expense management features to eliminate waste. This may vary from cloud providers like AWS, Azure , Google or even Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Initial cost of migrating core ERP applications like Oracle EBS, SAP, JD Edwards vs operational monthly cost is the core focus. Realising ROI in the first 5 years will be difficult if control measures are not in place. A lack of cloud cost optimization governance causes organizations to initially overshoot their cloud IaaS budgets. Organizations need to budget, buy and consume differently but do not have the people, required skill sets, tools or processes to do this effectively.
Key Insights
Several organizations will initially overshoot their cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) budgets, due to a lack of cloud cost optimization governance or misguided upfront cloud spend commitments.
Strategies for Saving Cloud Infrastructure Costs?
- Avoid under- or over-architecting your cloud platform by looking beyond what is currently provisioned and by capturing requirements related to workload availability, performance and functionality.
- Leverage certified Oracle cloud MSP/MSE who are equipped with the right cloud service expense management and cloud management platform tools, and who can help you automate the turning off of resources when not in use and regularly rightsize instances.
- Make end users both aware of and accountable for the money spent through transparent resource consumption — which starts with tagging.
- Maximize savings and free up support personnel by evaluating options beyond basic IaaS.
Key Responsibilities Areas (KRAs) for Cloud Cost Management
Migrating Oracle EBS to OCI and ensuring you keep optimizing the environment for maximizing the benefits of the cloud. You will have to keep a track of the cloud usage or ensure a certified cloud expert / Oracle MSPs, do it for you.
Key Insights
Organizations that perform “lift and shift” to cloud IaaS without proper cost optimization governance will be overprovisioned by as much as 55%, and will overspend by 70% during the first 18 months.
- Set and manage cloud budgets
- Stay on top of cloud spending
- Ensure accurate cost tracking across departments and projects
- Analyze which departments, services, and projects are contributing to cloud usage over time
- Get granular usage details for invoice reconciliation
- Analyze Usage for cost optimization.
Here we talk about cost management on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with two expert tools:
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cost Management
- Nagios for Oracle
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cost Management
While you may find many 3rd party tools to do this job for you, Oracle provides the most easy to connect tool for EBS running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Cost Management solution.
What does it help deliver?
You get enterprise-grade controls for Predictability, Control, Visibility, Optimization, and Extensibility.
Predictability – Leverage budgets ensure predictable cloud spending. With this tool you can allocate budget to different departments, forecast spending, and avoid overages.
Leverage these cost management tools to allocate budgets, specify thresholds, trigger email alerts to help you to forecast spends.
Control
Oracle typically recommends creating a compartment for each major part of your organization (business unit or department). Compartments can also be nested to support sub-departments as well. You can also centrally control usage of the company’s high value cloud resources, with the use of assigning Quotas. With the use of Quotas you can ensure no single department overshoots the allocated budget.
Visibility
You can also rely on Oracle’s cost management tools, to maintain visibility over spending and cost optimization. With the cost analysis dashboard, you can have visibility by, Cost by service, Cost by Department, Cost by Cost-tracking tag. To get Invoice reconciliation and Billing transparency, you can also export usage reports to get Granular, Hour by Hour, Resource level visibility into your billing data.
The billing cost analysis dashboard can help visualize the big buckets that are contributing to cloud usage and cost, namely cloud service, compartments, and tags. With proper tagging, an analyst or administrator can use this tool to identify the difference between increased production or development or test usage, as well as the difference between increased usage of storage against networking. You can easily use other OCI tools for cost optimization.
Optimization
For cloud optimization, you get detailed usage reports and with the help of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tools you can make informed decisions for cost optimization. E.g You can track high cost, lowest usage CPU utilization to decide whether to Keep it on, switch it off with the right justification.
Extensibility
You should be able to leverage existing cloud management solutions, and business intelligence solutions, for Third party tools. Oracle Cloud Cost management provides that level of extensibility. You have the flexibility to use the granular data from the usage report,to create custom reports, visualization, and dashboards.
Oracle Cloud Monitoring with Nagios
IT Convergence for the last 20 years has successfully customized Nagios- Enterprise Edition, for Oracle applications. With this cost effective monitoring and management tool you can control your Oracle cloud spends.
All services deployed on Oracle cloud or our data centres are easily monitored with Nagios. Nagios provides complete monitoring of Oracle database servers and databases – including availability, database and table sizes, cache ratios, and other key metrics.
Implementing effective Oracle monitoring with Nagios offers the following benefits
- Increased application availability
- Increased database performance
- Fast detection of database outages, failures, and table corruption
- Predictive analysis of storage requirements and index performance
- Custom perl/shell/etc plugins
- Mobile Interface
- Reporting & Dashboards
- Performance Data Graphs
- Data Retention
- Available On-Premise & Within All Clouds
While this ready to use customized Nagios is tried and tested & much more cost effective than using Oracle Cloud cost management and is able to deliver more granular reports for Oracle and non-oracle solutions running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Choice of tool will be determined by your current application /cloud environment.
Conclusion
Pre-cloud migration commitments to lower costs makes it very important to key a track of costs Post migration. According to Gartner, leveraging an Oracle certified MSP partner can help ensure you have the depth of tools and skills to make faster decisions to control and optimize your cloud costs. Check out the key considerations in choosing a MSP partner
IT Convergence can help you save time and money on your current Oracle onprem / cloud investments. You can engage IT Convergence for:
- Predictability,- Giving you the ability to predict cloud spend and prevent overages.
- Control – Enforce Quotas you need for high value cloud resources.
- Visibility – To see which cloud resources are driving high usage and by which departments, or projects.
- Optimization – Ability to perform cost optimization ,and lower spend and lastly
- Extensibility – to leverage the Cloud BI tools you know and love and already use.
