Managed Cost Advisory dashboard by Evidi

Evidi are a managed services provider specializing in Microsoft stack. Andre is the head of Evidi’s Managed Cloud Cost Monitoring & Optimization service, and he uses SquaredUp dashboards to help customers slash cloud expenses and maximize efficiency.

Dashboard overview

This cost optimization dashboard offers savings recommendations, reserved instance advisories, and a detailed cost comparison by resource group.

The whole point of this dashboard is to show us where we can cut costs. It’s helpful to go into someone’s tenant and get this picture immediately. It helps us figure out where to start and see what’s downscalable. It makes it easier to start a conversation with customers about right-sizing and helps them make more informed budget decisions too.

Dashboard walkthrough

Upon connecting our data this is the picture we get out of the box for each customer.

App Service Plans

Immediately visible are large tiles displaying app service plans.

In this example, there are several app service plans labeled with "dev" in the name, which raises the question of whether these could be free SKUs, potentially offering significant cost savings for the customer. While this may not always be the case, it is certainly a useful starting point for cost reduction.

We can also see test-named premium plans on this dashboard which are potentially downscalable.

G/ZRS storage accounts

You can also see the number of G/ZRS storage accounts and know to multiply the price of storage in the cloud by two if you have zone redundant storage. Zone redundancy is not always necessary in test or dev environments, so a judgement call can be made around whether to cut costs here. It’s great information to have out of the box for that initial chat with a customer.

Azure Advisor

You can see a table of cost saving recommendations from Azure Advisor, in context, alongside the rest of your stats.

Autoscaling

The dashboard also shows the number of costly premium app service plans which don’t have autoscaling enabled. This is important to flag as while there are certain rare instances where it makes sense not to have autoscaling enabled, most of the time enabling it brings cost savings right away.

Cost comparison per resource group

For custom metrics that require some manipulation you can easily use Kusto. My Kusto wizard colleague wrote a query that displays cost comparison per resource group alongside the percentage increase or decrease over the past month, which is a really helpful view. We have alerts on these metrics so it’s flagged to our support team if there is a spike in costs, for example.

It’s so helpful having this metric as part of our process as a basis for discussion. Cost increases prompt the question of whether this was a conscious increase in spend, or perhaps something that didn’t go through a full spending review. The ability to display cost reductions has been helpful as well as it demonstrates the benefits of us deprovisioning something or re-sizing an application.

How we use the dashboard

Not only does this dashboard provide us the complete visibility we need over cost recommendations, it is a handy overview to show when bringing these concerns to customers. It makes it easy to start a conversation around cutting out things that are perhaps nice to have in the cloud, but too costly and not in use, as all of the evidence is clearly displayed.

Evidi's full SquaredUp story

The best part is that with SquaredUp, we have been able to build out a core set of dashboards that provide a holistic picture of our customers – both at an individual level and as a big picture overview.

Read our case study to learn about how we built the perfect suite of dashboards for MSPs, or anyone trying to slash costs and maximize efficiency.