What’s been your experience on trying to build or buy a “single pane of glass” to fully understand your organization’s entire cloud ecosystem?

One challenge is comparing costs and efficiencies between on-prem and cloud, especially with features like disaster recovery. There are additional benefits in the cloud, such as automatic patching, that you do not have on-prem. Factoring in these efficiencies can make cost comparisons tricky. I have shut down private data centers in two companies, moving everything to SaaS or to a hyperscaler cloud. It takes time, but there are additional benefits to being on a common platform.

We are not in a multi-cloud environment and use Azure for everything. Azure has native tools that we are starting to use. Our challenge is deciding which applications and databases to move to the cloud and doing a cost-benefit analysis. We are early in the journey and have not yet used third-party tools, but I expect we will need to as our environment becomes more complex

I am a fan of using a third-party SaaS offering for a single pane of glass, particularly in a multi-cloud environment. SaaS solutions have a much faster ramp-up time compared to building your own. Another benefit is that these tools provide a common language for teams consuming the metrics. While cloud-native tools from hyperscalers offer monitoring, few suggest a governance model, whereas SaaS solutions often provide at least a framework for governance.
We have tried building our own using Power BI, but it was slow and biased by the BI team’s approach to data modeling. As for third-party tools, we have used CloudHealth, which was great when we were learning to manage costs. As we matured and our environment became more complex, especially in a multi-cloud setup, we found gaps. Today, we use CloudZero, which addresses many of those gaps, though we rely on other tools for right-sizing recommendations.