SPEAKER: Ever opened up an invoice
from your Cloud provider and been
surprised by what's inside?
Well, then this video is for you.
Today, we're talking about managing your Cloud costs
by exporting billing data into your data warehouse
and analyzing it with Looker.
So let's jump in.
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Managing your billing inside of the Cloud
can be a difficult task.
Most Cloud providers employ a pay
for what you use model, which means that if you're closely
monitoring usage across services,
you can definitely save on technology costs.
But if you don't have centralized billing reporting
and have low visibility into your Cloud spend,
unwanted or unknown spending can really start to add up.
Additionally, each Cloud provider
has their own billing methodology, their own suite
of SKUs and services, and their own way of reporting
that information back to you.
This means that as a member of the FinOps team,
you might spend hours manually centralizing, reconciling,
and harmonizing billing across services and providers
each month, all to ask a simple question like,
what did our marketing teams cost us in Cloud Infrastructure
last quarter?
Well, don't worry.
Because, today, we're going to walk through how
you can leverage Looker's Cloud cost management solution to not
only control costs for your organization,
but also reduced waste and predictably forecast
both cost and resource needs.
So what makes Looker so great to solve this problem?
Well, Looker is a business intelligence platform
that sits directly on top of your data warehouse,
giving business users self-service access
to explore governed data.
This is all powered by Looker's modeling layer, LookML.
With LookML, analysts can define a single source of truth
for metrics used across your organization.
And Looker goes beyond traditional BI,
offering integrations to deliver data
when and where you need it.
When it comes to Cost Management,
Looker offers real-time insights into Cloud spend and usage
so that Cloud users across teams or cost centers
can better understand and take action
to manage their infrastructure spend.
So let's go ahead and dig into the details of the solution.
This solution was purposely designed
to be implemented in phases so that you can start to get value
immediately and then further customize it
based on your initial findings.
So the first phase includes access
to Looker Blocks, or pre-built LookML models and dashboards
that can be installed in just a few clicks
from the marketplace on your Looker instance.
In fact, we've created three different blocks,
one for each major Cloud provider,
so that you can pick and choose which you want to leverage,
depending on what providers you use.
In this phase, the billing data for each provider
stays inside of that Cloud.
So you connect Looker to Amazon Web Services billing
data that has been exported into Athena,
Azure billing data into Azure SQL warehouse,
and Google Cloud billing data into BigQuery.
Additionally, this block uses Booker's ability
to merge query results from different data warehouses
to create a unified dashboard showing you
spend across all three clouds.
So now you might be wondering, what do these blocks actually
do for me?
Let's take a deeper look at how a FinOps
team might use phase one of the Cloud cost management solution.
In phase one, you're given access
to a set of dashboards for each Cloud.
For example, here you can see dashboards for Google.
Let's start with a summary view where
you can see at a high level where your organization is
spending on GCP.
From here, you can drill into specific projects or products,
like Compute Engine, where we seem to be spending a lot.
Google Cloud also offers tactical recommendations
for limiting cost.
For example, here we can see that if we stop this idle VM,
we can save close to $900.
To directly implement this change,
we can simply click here to go directly
to that page in the Google Cloud console.
Also in phase one, you get access
to a simple dashboard that shows you
spend across all of these clouds using Looker's merged results
feature.
Here you can get an idea for how spend
compares across providers.
With phase one, you jumpstart your Cloud cost management with
out-of-the-box reporting.
And if you're only heavily using one Cloud,
it might be suitable for your longer-term needs,
but there are some limitations to this approach primarily
because of the data that's siloed in provider
specific data warehouses.
In phase two, companies work with Looker and partners
to centralize data in BigQuery so that all Cloud Billing
information is stored in a central location.
Phase two allows you to ask deeper questions of your data
because billing SKUs and services are
harmonized across providers.
So instead of looking at macro trends
like total spend for each provider,
you can drill in to see specifics.
For example, if you're spending more on machine learning,
specifically on Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.
So let's take a look.
In phase two, we go beyond the original multicloud report.
Because data from each Cloud is centralized into a single data
warehouse, you're able to compare
spend across specific services and SKUs,
like we're showing here.
For example, we can focus on spend for Compute
across all three providers.
Centralizing your Cloud Billing data into BigQuery
unlocks even more cost-saving opportunities.
But in the last phase, we take things
one step further by mapping tags,
labels, and call center information
across each of the clouds.
Additionally, we introduce automatic data actions
and BigQuery machine learning forecasting models
to empower you to be proactive about spending decisions
and take direct action from within the tool.
Let's see how that empowers users to further optimize
spend.
With phase three, you're given much more power
to act on cost insights.
Now, with cost center mappings customized
for your organization, you can do things
like leverage machine learning models
to estimate future spend for specific business areas.
So instead of needing to manually create
invoices in Excel, Looker will send a document
with each line item to the appropriate director
on your behalf.
Awesome.
So now you should have an understanding
of how Looker gives FinOps teams the ability
to save money and reduce waste for Cloud Infrastructure.
Through this phased approach, you
can start optimizing right away, and then
continue to customize and integrate insights
to further support your organization.
Ready to get started?
Check out the links below.
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