Cutting through Amazon Web Services complexity is becoming quite a business. CloudCheckr is the latest to leverage AWS’ lack of tools for analyzing resources, costs and security with the news of a $2 million investment and the general availability of its freemium service. The Series A round was led by Garrison Capital with Genesee Capital also participating.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say a customer has started using AWS. As time goes on, it becomes apparent that customers don’t have a simple way to get a picture of the overall health of what they have deployed. It’s possible to get the information, but the system is fairly complex. Enter CloudCheckr.
Customers first configure their AWS accounts so they can be accessed by the CloudCheckr service.
Then they configure their reporting settings, which can be customized to include particular modules such as resource monitoring. They can also monitor multiple services and all regions within the deployment. Results are then displayed on a dashboard and graphically.
For example, EC2 Summary reporting outlines resources by Size, Purchasing Type, Region, Platform, AMI, and Cost. The Detail report provides granular insight into individual instances by all of these lenses plus adds individual metrics such as launch time, utilization levels, attached EBS volumes, IP addresses, and more.
CloudCheckr also offers a module for costs and best practices, which looks particularly helpful. With the module, CloudCheckr assesses the state of a customer’s deployment against best practices being used across AWS. It then checks and alerts customers to exceptions.
CloudCheckr competes in a quickly emerging space against companies such as Cloudability and Newvem.
Cloudability gives visibility into online services that employees are using. It provides an interface that lets a CFO see all of the company’s cloud accounts (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) from the different parts of the organization. The accounts may be viewed individually or as a combined spend. Drill-down reports allow the CFO to analyze the costs by service, by account or by users, providing a view of what’s costing the most.
Newvem particularly monitors AWS instances for a customer. For example, last year it began offering a Google Analytics type of service for AWS. It looks at baseline levels of usage that a customer will need during the length of the AWS contract. It examines the types of machines and instances they’ll need to meet their requirements. It also helps determine the best geographic location of the instances. In essence, it helps them have some certainty about what they are getting before they commit to a long-term contract.
Jonathan Clay, vice president of operations at Get Satisfaction, said the CloudCheckr service gives the company a single portal with which to monitor usage and spending with reporting features. It also provides recommendations around capacity — identifying under-utilized and over-utilized instances, as well as offering recommendations for reserved instances. This helps the company optimize its spending and discover waste, as well as make sure it follows security best practices.
CloudCheckr makes it simpler to view inside AWS across a resource, cost and security spectrum. That’s an angle people need to get the most out of AWS. The question really becomes, though, how it compares to other competitors offering similar types of services.
The CloudChecklr service is free to start. A professional account is available on a subscription basis. Enterprise-level accounts are custom-developed.