In this enterprise cost containment series, we’ve tackled a range of topics from cloud to professional services and more. Now, I want to dive into the topic you may have expected us to cover from the start: monitoring. After all, at SolarWinds, we create monitoring software. The goal of this post is not to present or sell software, though. It’s our intention to help you have conversations with management and stakeholders—no matter the monitoring you use.

AWS tags are a bit like flossing your teeth every day — or getting eight hours of sleep a night. Everyone agrees they’re good habits that will make life easier down the road. But sometimes life gets in the way, and those habits fall a little short. Most teams set out with the intention to tag their infrastructure, but in our experience, it’s rare that companies have a perfect, thorough AWS tagging strategy.

The experienced IT professional is no stranger to the term “automation.” However, many don’t fully grasp the potential this word presents to IT processes, including the fast-growing realm of intelligent automation. But before you start looking to automation to help rein in costs, it’s important to develop an automation strategy that best fits the needs of your organization. This article explores the three key areas in which to start when building your automation framework.

First, thanks for indulging the clickbait title joke. Serialization is the unsung hero of harmonizing network and application relations and deserves the occasional, snarky callout. Moreover, identifying how the unique mix of network clients in your environment consume your carefully manicured infrastructure is critical for managing network cost. Because today, a rapidly expanding, diverse pile of new technologies all assume the network is a magic grid, no tuning required.

Reining in costs and ensuring your IT organization maximizes its technical ROI is a delicate balancing act of office politics and well-rooted processes. IT cost challenges tend to vary from business to business, but they have one thing in common: they’re all manageable. Taking the time to study the most common IT revenue black holes starts with developing an in-depth understanding of how each one can affect IT productivity and the business’s bottom line.

You’re probably familiar with the many benefits of licensing software using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. The most frequently touted benefit is that you pay only for what you use when you use it. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about upgrading, or server maintenance, or security. That’s all taken care of. However, even using a SaaS model, you still need to monitor and manage costs, which can be a challenge if you are working with several suppliers.

In 2021 it’s common practice for businesses to use a pay-as-you-go/use pricing model. It’s no different with Amazon. It’s also the primary reason why this article is such an important read for all those looking to reduce their AWS Lambda costs. In this article, we will go over six actionable strategies to optimize the cost relating to our AWS Lambda usage. One of the main reasons for choosing to move into the cloud is the ability to reduce costs.

Developers are the kingmakers. Millions of decisions made by tens of thousands of developers are ultimately responsible for the triumph or tragedy of IT. Developers for commercial vendors, open-source projects, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, managed service providers (MSPs), and internal teams make most technology decisions far upstream from IT pros. This essentially defines ops’ role as the crew who finds a way to make washing machines fly in formation.

Like a lot of SaaS companies, the CloudZero engineering team uses our own product — or as many would say, we “eat our own dog food” and “drink our own champagne”. So, when we built and released our cost per customer functionality last year, it was only natural that we were our own guinea pigs.

One of the most important things SaaS companies need to think about in order to be successful is financial modeling. To succeed in the increasingly competitive SaaS space, finance teams need to carefully consider a wide variety of KPIs and find ways to effectively manage both present and future cash flows. Cash flows and liquidity are two of the most common challenges faced in this industry — if effectively addressed, your company can position itself for long-term success.