Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, although most of our customers are large enterprises, we have an “Always Free” plan for smaller cloud systems where we think CloudMonitor will still be able to save you costs. Even if your costs are optimized, it’s good to have CloudMonitor monitoring your system for unwanted security or cost mishaps.

No. This is one of the key differences with CloudMonitor over other products that do cost optimization. In our opinion, it could be considered a security risk to send your private cloud data over the internet to a SaaS product or service. We think your data should stay firmly in your tenancy!

CloudMonitor will install to the Managed Resource Group and Subscription of your choice and run as normal cloud services. If you want to, you can monitor it and apply any policies and security policies in your organization to CloudMonitor itself.

No 3rd party or Guest accounts need to be created for CloudMonitor to work. Please ask your IT Team to contact us if they have any concerns so we can have a chat about the security controls in place for CloudMonitor.

CloudMonitor has different pricing plans to suit the size of your organization. You can start off with the Always Free plan and upgrade later. It’s the fully functional version of the CloudMonitor Reporting App and there’s no obligation to buy.

Have a look at our pricing page to see the different plans.

A Cost Group is a logical grouping of resources, usage and costs that can span multiple Subscriptions, Resource Groups and Resources.

In reality, a cloud application is never just a single Subscription or Resource Group. For example, there’s usually multiple environments; DEV, TEST and PROD, not to mention different standards from Group IT for how you manage your Non-Prod resources in Resource Groups.

CloudMonitor allows you to create Cost Groups that map to Business Units, Applications and Cost Centres as opposed to cloud technical structures, which means your Business Unit Owners can now get more accurate cost reports!

Yes. We provide a set of reports for you to get started but encourage you to build new Power BI reports on top of the CloudMonitor dataset to suit your business and workflow.

There are 2 components for CloudMonitor to work: The backend Azure Analytics Engine and the Power BI Reporting frontend.

Unfortunately due to limitations in the current Microsoft AppStore deployment mechanisms, we have to release them as 2 different packages, which is a little confusing and we apologise for the inconvenience. You can test the front-end Power BI application with the included sample data and then install the backend if you want to run the analytics on your own Azure data.

Both packages are completely free to install – you can get them from here:

• CloudMonitor Reporting App
• Cloud Monitor Analytics Engine

Yes. Your data never leaves your cloud tenancy and the team at CloudMonitor never see any of your data. CloudMonitor runs in a Resource Group in your Subscription and only you see what it produces. No one from the CloudMonitor team ever sees your private data. Technically speaking, we use the highest levels of encryption within Azure. This applies to data at rest and encryption during transmission:

• Encryption in transit (TLS 1.2)
• Encryption at rest (AES 256)
• All application keys and access tokens are stored securely in an Azure KeyVault

CloudMonitor has no limitation on the number of users allowed within your organization, however you will need to make sure each user has a PowerApps license in order to use the CloudMonitor Admin Portal.

CloudMonitor has the usual Budget versus Forecast, Usage and other standard reports you would expect, however you can get these same reports and dashboards at your Cost Group level, not just at a Subscription or Resource Group level, and best of all you do not need to do any complex tagging to use it. For example, you could have a project team for a specific application spanning multiple resources – now you can send the Project Manager an automatic monthly breakdown of their costs by user!

Each resource is assigned an “owner” who is the person currently responsible for managing this resource. CloudMonitor uses an algorithm and logging to work out who the Owner should be, however, if it is unable to find an appropriate person them this user is assigned as the default owner of that resource. This can be changed in the CloudMonitor application.

The CloudMonitor analytics engine will take 24 hours to extract and run your cost analytics after install. At this point, we need to send you your login details so that you can connect Power BI to the Analytics Engine. If we cannot contact you then you will not be able to use CloudMonitor as you will not be able to log in. We do not sell or share your email with anyone externally.

Overview

The costs below are in addition to the license cost of CloudMonitor and are paid directly to Microsoft. These apply even with the CloudMonitor “Always Free” license as they are the bare running costs and CloudMonitor is installed inside of your Azure cloud.

Azure Infrastructure Costs

CloudMonitor deploys a set of resources into your Azure cloud to process your cost analytics and recommendations. These native azure resources have their own costs which appear on your normal Azure invoice and are paid directly to Microsoft.

These costs are around $45 USD a month depending on the number of resources and the number of years of cost data that you have.

Power BI Reporting

Each Viewer of the Power BI reports will require a Power BI Pro license. There is a possibility that your company already has a licensing agreement in place with Microsoft (e.g. E3 or E5 Office365 Agreement) so check with your IT department if this will be an additional cost or not. This is paid directly to Microsoft.