The cloud vendor bill is just line items on compute/storage/network spend. Are there tools to go beyond the surface and help understand the costs, and optimize cloud consumption? (Note this is not a question of cost saving in the cloud, I have seen the Q&A on that topic in the forums).

Cloud cost management is complicated by the fact that cloud costs are variable in nature and charged in a myriad of ways (in fact there are over 500 thousand different SKUs across the three major providers), which makes aggregating charges and understanding costs in a multi-cloud environment extremely challenging. And without that ability, it is nearly impossible to measure the effectiveness of procurement decisions, and ultimately, the value cloud brings to your organization.

That’s why organizations are turning to practices like FinOps to provide the proper foundation for managing cloud costs -

While rolled up line items can be broken down thru the use of audit log tools or other means, with access created through IAM for some services, The devil however is always in the details.

Vendors such those listed below, range in capability but may make the matching of cost to capability or cost/project tenable

Apptio

ServiceNow
Digital Fuel
Nicus
AMALYTICS SOFTWARE
Bee360
ACCIOD
USU
Upland

Try looking at an app called Cloud Health.

I can share my experience from Azure Perspective since most of our workloads are there:

We used to struggle with our bills and cost management, as soon as Microsoft acquired Cloudyn, we created an account there and started to get insights on our spending, it went beyond the surface, but still wasn't enough.

Up until recently, it was exceedingly difficult to get insights, however, after Microsoft completed baking Cloudyn into Azure, and using the Azure Preview portal https://preview.portal.azure.com (Click Try Preview in Azure Cost Management Page) - we are now able to drill down very easily and get detailed consumption data on each resource using the Cost Management Preview Feature, I recommend you check that feature out.

The data is exportable to CSV and exports can be automated to Azure Storage, there is also an API that you can use, hooking that up with PowerBI and spending a few hours tweaking the report can provide you with the insights you need, the service does support connecting to AWS, but we haven't tested this capability.

A lot of comments and recommendations appear to be on monitoring and optimization using specific vendors for AWS to a large extent. Obviously they being the market leader - there is a lot of experience in managing AWS. Having said that, many companies are multi-cloud or use other clouds from not just Microsoft and Google, but go beyond that. So here are a few tips from my experience as a CIO as well as Consulting Advisor. This assumes a basic understanding of infrastructure components and how they interplay. If as a CIO you need help on this, I am sure there would be someone in your team who can. This applies largely to IaaS.

1. You need to understand what each line item stands for; take help of the cloud provider and potentially a cloud agnostic partner. This is necessary to know what you have.
2. Make a table with who (which function and users), what (which application) uses what you have listed in step 1. Add business criticality as a measure to understand potential implications of changes.
3. Get data on usage over a minimum of 3 months at a granular level which helps understand peaks and troughs, and average use. Usage should be between 50-70%, anything less can be reduced, anything more needs to be resized. Peaks can be managed with elasticity if they are short bursts.
4. Get help from a partner on orchestration especially in a hybrid scenario, and if cloud first, then re-architecture for optimization.
5. Repeat every 6 months or at least annually

Using the above methodology I could assist a cloud first enterprise with almost $ 60 million in cloud spend to reduce their expense by 25%. I would also recommend https://www.locuz.com/us/ as a potential partner.

Hope this helps and all the best !

I’ve seen tools both from the providers themselves and from 3rd parties , as well as provider training on how to size and select based on your needs .