IBM Cloudability - Cost Optimization, Governance & FinOps Management

My main use case for Apptio Cloudability is optimization, cloud cost management, and container management.

I have a cloud environment that hosts containers, and I use information around the CPU requests and limits and memory requests and limits to size my infrastructure correctly.

Cloud optimization is very key for me, and I am using that to embed into my cloud cost optimization recommendations process which I send out to my engineers, and I track against the implementation of those recommendations.

The best features that Apptio Cloudability offers are the cloud optimization for the AWS field and the Azure field, which are probably the best.

What makes the cloud optimization for AWS and Azure stand out for me is the broad range of tactics that are available there, which allows my teams to really concentrate on the core infrastructure elements.

Apptio Cloudability has positively impacted my organization by providing cloud cost visibility, allowing there to be trust in those numbers, providing showback and chargeback capabilities, and ensuring that cloud costs are fully understood. Additionally, it has allowed me to identify cloud cost optimization opportunities, enabling my organization to utilize savings to reinvest in adding further value for my customers.

Apptio Cloudability can be improved as the range of optimization opportunities for Google is very limited in comparison to competitors in the market.

Additionally, the fact that Alibaba Cloud is not incorporated in the tool has meant that I have had to create a Power BI ecosystem outside in order to get the total TCO view for all my cloud providers.

Other improvements needed for Apptio Cloudability include the ability to forecast down at the SKU or at least at the service level, which would be quite useful to have. Additionally, more visibility around input, output, cash token usage would be very important on the AI side, as would more visibility around egress costs and retry costs.

Apptio Cloudability needs to evolve and develop much faster in comparison to competitors in the market. On the Google side, numerous other vendors have three to four, if not five, different optimization tactics, but within Apptio Cloudability, there are only two, and even the native console at Google has more optimization tactics. The cadence and speed of development must improve on a tool such as Apptio Cloudability, especially as AI usage and AI capabilities increase.

I have been using Apptio Cloudability for five years.

Apptio Cloudability does have its issues, and I have been experiencing a few outage issues; the communication around those outage issues has been quite poor.

Regarding Apptio Cloudability's scalability, on a scale of one to 10, I would rate it probably a seven to eight, as it also depends on the complexity of the business dimensions I have introduced, which can make it a bit unwieldy if I am doing too much in there.

The customer support is probably a six to seven; it has been quite slow, and getting resolution can be quite slow, although I do have monthly governance meetings where I highlight these outstanding cases that I do have.

I would rate the customer support as seven out of 10.

I previously used Excel because my cloud spend was quite small, but after seeing the exponential growth in cloud coming in 2019, that is when I decided to move to Apptio Cloudability.

I did not purchase Apptio Cloudability through the AWS Marketplace.

My advice to others looking into using Apptio Cloudability is to have a view of what hyperscalers or vendors they are going to be using over the next few years and marry that in with Apptio Cloudability. I would recommend they ensure that they have enough people trained up to implement the tool and to understand the billing concepts at the front. Additionally, any team that is going to implement this should be FinOps experts, because that is what is needed. One of the biggest issues in a regulated environment is to check the references of Apptio's other clients to see how easy it was for the tool to get implemented in such an environment.

I have seen a return on investment; the issue was that before I purchased Apptio Cloudability, I just had two people running it in an Excel spreadsheet. Obviously, five years down the line, I now have an ecosystem that is looking after in excess of 350 million dollars a year of cloud spend going through the tool. Therefore, the employees have actually gone up because the demand on the team has gone up. The return on investment is definitely substantial because the level of savings that I have achieved are significant, and my team is seen as a resource to come to in order to make those savings. The numbers have become the trusted source and are used in vendor negotiations and forecasting discussions at the board level.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was limited because it was done centrally by procurement.

Before choosing Apptio Cloudability, I evaluated building something myself first and foremost, and then I looked at a number of other products at the time, although I cannot remember who they were, as it has been five or six years ago. I am constantly evolving and having discussions with tooling providers over the last five years as well.

Regarding Apptio Cloudability's AI capabilities, governance and security are improving, but they could be better; it seems to be a slow-evolving process to get that capability there.

The issue with Apptio Cloudability's AI capabilities regarding its accuracy and reliability of output is really on the data, as the tool itself can deliver some good features, but if the data is not good enough, then it renders the functionality meaningless.

I would rate this product overall a six out of 10.

My main use case for Apptio Cloudability was for a project called Project Apollo that had a target of saving a million Australian dollars by April 2026. It had a lot to do with contract renewals, and we needed to save a certain amount of money for the budget so that we could get a better negotiation price on our contract renewals. We were able to achieve this through the use of detection of rogue spending through Apptio Cloudability.

There was a lot of rogue spending we detected through Apptio Cloudability. We found out there were multiple Direct Connects that we were using and we did not need as many. We were able to find those through Apptio Cloudability and rationalize those Direct Connects, which saved us a lot of money. We also found wasted, very old EBS snapshots that were costing us a lot of money. They could be anywhere between seven to ten years old and had never been cleaned up before. They were costing us a lot of money. Additionally, we identified opportunities for EC2 right-sizing, RDS right-sizing, and OpenShift right-sizing. Right-sizing across all the different platforms was something we were able to utilize and detect through Apptio Cloudability to find out what the cost efficiencies were and the savings going forward. These were the harder projects to complete and take to fruition because there was a lot of communication needed with application owners. There was also a lot of agreement needed on timings and windows when these things could be done. Nonetheless, we were able to keep pushing the project, keep on top of it, and continue following up. The hardest part was keeping the communications open and ensuring that the people involved understood why we were doing what we were doing and why it needed to be done. If it ain't broke, do not fix it is very much a mantra across industry and life in general. Many of these production loads were not broken, but they were costing us a fortune. Communication was absolutely one of the biggest things here.

The best features Apptio Cloudability offers are the advanced right-sizing capabilities after Turbonomic was integrated into Apptio Cloudability Premium, which is a fantastic feature. You get really good savings outcomes, and you are able to see quickly by changing generations and EC instance types. Recently, they changed the default on the costing when you go into these windows, whether it is right-sizing or reporting or whatever. The default for costing has changed, and that default is what we use all the time, which has benefited us from that perspective.

I like the new dark layout. It is much better on your eyes. Recently, I have been pushing for information about the MCP for Apptio Cloudability and the AI integration that is coming extremely soon. I have seen some private preview on that, so I am very excited about those coming forward. The core business mappings and the dimension side of Apptio Cloudability is really good to set up ownership and chargeback and showback. We are sorely lacking in chargeback and showback at the moment. We have created a center of excellence that includes cyber and different teams in CloudOps to ensure that we have a FinOps lens across everything we do going forward. Apptio Cloudability is a huge part of that because it also means that it is really easy to give RBAC control, that is, view access to different teams so that they can see what is happening with their costing really clearly. They can see from a granular point of view exactly what they are spending on and how they can fix it going forward and what they can improve and change from a different instance type or a different way of turning on and off machines and all these different things. Apptio Cloudability was really good from that perspective, being able to help us with those detections.

The support that we have had throughout has been exemplary. The consultation when we set up Apptio Cloudability was excellent. I worked one-on-one with the consultants for quite a few weeks. I then took over the project to onboarding Apptio Cloudability into the company. The one-to-one relationship I had with the engineers and the project managers from IBM/Apptio Cloudability was second to none. It was always a matter of going out of the way to help us make sure that we had everything set up as we needed so that we could use the product as fast as we could and in the best way that we could. I want to give a shout out to support and the professional services.

I would put support and EC2 right-sizing right up with each other because without the support, it would not have been as easy to understand how to leverage these capabilities and get the most out of Apptio Cloudability. I would be able to use the EC2 right-sizing ability of Apptio Cloudability and to understand the reporting and the view side. I would definitely be putting the onboarding experience and the consultation experience right up there.

I think Apptio Cloudability is a really very good platform for costing. I do understand it can be cost-prohibitive to buy the license to use Apptio Cloudability because of the way it charges. If you are not a big enough company, I can understand that. Apptio Cloudability might want to look at costing models for smaller businesses that cannot afford Apptio Cloudability or Apptio Cloudability Premium. I believe Premium is about one hundred thousand dollars or so in US dollars, and Apptio Cloudability I believe is a little bit less than that. However, there are small businesses out there that will not be able to afford either option. I wonder if that is a market to target, to look at a smaller model of Apptio Cloudability or at least a smaller costing model that could help those businesses as well.

The other thing is that there are just a few anomalies inside Apptio Cloudability that I think can definitely be improved. It seems a really small thing, but when you are using it, it can actually be quite a big thing. Since Turbonomic has been integrated with Apptio Cloudability, as good as that is to be able to get those different costing figures and larger savings, it does not give the ability to have an instant Jira ticket integration with the Turbonomic costings or the advanced costing, if you would call it, inside Apptio Cloudability Premium. In the basic costings, you can use Jira and you can open up a Jira ticket and you can have all this information straight from Apptio Cloudability straight in the Jira ticket, assign it to someone, and then someone is working on it. You cannot do that in Turbonomic at the moment. I am not really sure why. Obviously, there is some sort of development issue behind the scenes, I imagine, with the way that Turbonomic works compared to the basic costing. It would be a huge advantage to be able to do that, to just open a Jira ticket, have someone assigned to it, and then proceed forward. I definitely think they should look at that.

I have been using Apptio Cloudability for about a year and a half or just under a year and a half.

I have not experienced any stability issues.

I have not experienced any scalability issues. It absorbs our new accounts quite easily. As for completely new resources, time will tell. We have only had Apptio Cloudability for about seven to eight months, and many people still do not know about it. They know of it, but they have not really used it, and they have not used it in its entirety. It is early days.

The support that we have had throughout has been exemplary. The consultation when we set up Apptio Cloudability was excellent. I worked one-on-one with the consultants for quite a few weeks. I then took over the project to onboarding Apptio Cloudability into the company. The one-to-one relationship I had with the engineers and the project managers from IBM/Apptio Cloudability was second to none. It was always a matter of going out of the way to help us make sure that we had everything set up as we needed so that we could use the product as fast as we could and in the best way that we could. I want to give a shout out to support and the professional services.

I would put support and EC2 right-sizing right up with each other because without the support, it would not have been as easy to understand how to leverage these capabilities and get the most out of Apptio Cloudability to be able to use the EC2 right-sizing ability of Apptio Cloudability and to understand the reporting and the view side. I would definitely be putting the onboarding experience and the consultation experience right up there.

We did not have any other platform doing proper FinOps. We did have a platform that probably could do some FinOps, but it was not being leveraged properly, and it was not socialized properly. People did not really get it. When you have new leadership that comes into the company that has a preference for a certain product, they normally push that product, especially if they have had favorable and particularly good experiences with that product.

It was fine. It absorbs our new accounts quite easily. As for completely new resources, time will tell. We have only had Apptio Cloudability for about seven to eight months, and many people still do not know about it. They know of it, but they have not really used it, and they have not used it in its entirety. It is early days.

I have been one-on-one with Apptio professional services for a while and I have been pushing a few things and they are coming to fruition. The MCP server for Apptio Cloudability was one that I thought was sorely lacking, but obviously they were working on that in the background and it is in private preview now. It is going to be really interesting to see how we can leverage that and utilize that. I have used an MCP server but I do not think it is necessarily the absolute official MCP of Apptio Cloudability, but it is one that is being used widely. I used it for documentation and it was particularly good.

Apptio Cloudability helped us save a million dollars up until the contract renewal. It was a large catalyst to why we were able to get a really good contract renewal with AWS going forward. We needed to save a certain amount of money so that we had it in the budget to have leverage in the CloudOps area.

We reduced our waste by at least twenty percent really quickly because we were able to jump onto EBS snapshots straight away for these sort of things. That saved us anywhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred thousand dollars really fast because we had a lot of snapshots in a lot of accounts. It was just wasted storage. We also had some accounts that were sitting there and needed to be decommissioned. They were non-production accounts but they were taking up a lot of project dollars. Apptio Cloudability helped us ensure that because we could see the cost so clearly, we got these accounts decommissioned as soon as possible, rather than saying we would get to that. It was made a priority because we could see what it was costing us so clearly.

I was consulted on pricing and setup cost because we already had a governance tool that was costing us about seventy thousand dollars a year. I knew that tool had the ability to do pricing and cost savings and efficiencies. I also knew that the company was not leveraging it anywhere near the ability and capacity that it had. When people came to me and asked what I thought about this from a cost perspective, I said I was not sure. The product looked great, but one hundred thousand dollars, I did not know. I think if the only tool you have is Apptio Cloudability, maybe that is a fair pricing. It is very hard for me to judge when it comes to pricing. I did not have a lot to do with the negotiation of buying. I was just consulted a little on what my opinion was on going forward, whether we should get Premium or Apptio Cloudability.

Premium is particularly good with the advanced Turbonomics, but you do pay for that. I think if you are not going to use a lot of the automation that comes with the Turbonomics, with the cost findings and the ability to turn machines on and off and all these different things, it is probably not worth paying for Premium. But if you are going to utilize that, it definitely is worth paying for Premium.

I looked at Vanta in the past, and I looked at CloudCheckr, and there are a few other options we looked at. One of the main reasons that we came down to Apptio Cloudability is mainly because we had new leadership come in, and they had used Apptio Cloudability quite a lot. They really enjoyed the product. They had a relationship with the people pushing the product, not a personal relationship but a work relationship through a vendor relationship with these people before. They thought it was worth bringing in because of such a good experience before, which makes sense. I have seen this happen many times.

If you are a small business and you are thinking about Apptio Cloudability, probably err on the side of Apptio Cloudability rather than Apptio Cloudability Premium. Also, check your pricing models and have a chat with your professional services and sales and the rest of them to find out the best deal you can possibly get because they are very good to deal with. They believe in their product and they want to get a good price for their product, but also they want to make sure that you are happy with their product and utilizing it to the best of your ability. Support has really been good from that perspective.

Apptio Cloudability does not give the ability to have an instant Jira ticket integration with the Turbonomic costings or the advanced costing inside Apptio Cloudability Premium at the moment. You cannot do that in Turbonomic right now. It would be a huge advantage if you could.

I would rate this review as an eight out of ten.

I use Cloudability to track costs across a multi-cloud infrastructure estate, including Google Cloud, AWS Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Everything from reports and dashboards to anomaly alerts and right-sizing is managed through Cloudability.

I regularly use the reporting feature in Cloudability. If I'm trying to figure out how much cost is attributed to a specific account, I'd create a report based on the account name. That allows for historical tracking of how the costs have maybe increased or decreased over time, and that's quite useful.

In addition to my main use case, I use the dashboards feature regularly as well. If I want to have a higher view level of what cloud costs are within the estate, I would use the dashboards because I can look at multiple cloud accounts at once.

Cloudability positively impacts my organization by allowing for greater cost observability, which then drives better spending decisions and reduces costs. I've definitely seen those benefits from using the tool, and because of the breadth and depth of the features that the tool offers, you can get really specifically into minute costs. You can save money at the high level by looking across the entire estate, or you can really drill down to save specific costs, making cost saving the biggest benefit.

I can't share any specific metrics around cost savings or decision-making improvements because they'd be business sensitive, but through the right-sizing feature and the commitment manager feature, it's common to save anywhere from 10 to 20% of costs across an entire estate just by right-sizing instances to the right level and then purchasing commitments. Commitments save anywhere between 30 to 50% when executed, so if you're able to do that across a good number of instances, you can easily achieve 10% plus cost savings, which could be massive if your organization has a large cloud spend.

The best features Cloudability offers include the reporting feature, which is good because you can get very detailed, not just at the cloud account level, but you can drill down into particular resource usage. You can look at costs over granular periods of time, like one day or a few hours, and that's really good. The Views feature is also beneficial because lots of teams may use Cloudability within an organization, allowing users to segregate data to particular Views so they are only looking at what's relevant to them.

The Views feature in Cloudability is very useful for my teams because if you're in an organization that has hundreds or maybe even thousands of cloud accounts, different teams only operate in specific accounts rather than across all of them. A good way to use Views is to section data based on things such as business unit or which engineering team an individual is part of, so the data can thus be scoped down to specifically the engineer's ownership.

The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using. IBM, the company that runs Cloudability, released the Groups feature back in the summer of 2025. While Groups can be used in some parts of the tool, it can't be used across the entire tool. I've found that Groups is basically unusable because if it can't be used everywhere, you would have to run both group-based access control and direct user-based access control at the same time, which doesn't make any sense. The Groups feature has improved over time, but it's still not something we feel we can use on an everyday basis, so the IAM section remains an issue right now.

Most of the tool is very well-functioning and developed, and that's the only real improvement area that we've seen.

I've been using Cloudability for around two years.

Cloudability is very stable. We haven't noticed any downtime.

Cloudability's scalability is excellent because it can link with as few as one cloud account to thousands of cloud accounts, so there are no issues there.

The customer support from Cloudability is great. We regularly talk with IBM, and they help us a lot. I have no complaints at all. They're very good.

We've previously used the direct integrated FinOps features within cloud platforms. In AWS, there's the cost and accounts management section, and we've used similar functionalities in GCP and Azure. While those tools were good, Cloudability offers even deeper features and, because it's multi-cloud, it allows for costs to be seen in one place across all three cloud providers, which is the reason we wanted to use it.

Pricing and setup cost for Cloudability are good. Compared to the rest of the industry, they may be a little more expensive than some other FinOps tools, but that's to be expected because they have more functionality. So while it's a bit more expensive, you also get value for money because of the breadth and depth of the features.

I have seen a return on investment using Cloudability. As I mentioned before, it'd be very easy to save at least 10 to 20% costs from cloud spend just by utilizing the features of right-sizing or commitments management that Cloudability offers.

Pricing and setup cost for Cloudability are good. Compared to the rest of the industry, they may be a little more expensive than some other FinOps tools, but that's to be expected because they have more functionality. So while it's a bit more expensive, you also get value for money because of the breadth and depth of the features.

We didn't evaluate other vendors before choosing Cloudability; we simply evaluated using the built-in cloud provider tooling. The reason for this is that Cloudability is the market leader and has a strong reputation.

I would rate Cloudability a nine on a scale of 1 to 10.

I give it a nine because it's a very good tool with many different features, and the only thing that would push it up to a 10 is if the group IAM access control was more developed. However, that's a minor thing and doesn't affect the core functionality of the tool.

I would recommend using Cloudability and linking it with all cloud providers because the multi-cloud benefit really is great. IBM documentation is good, and their support service is brilliant as well. I would recommend using the tool.