Stratusphere™ FinOps and AWS Trusted Advisor are two prominent tools for AWS cost optimization. They help you to understand your cloud usage and resources. In this article, we deep dive into them both so you can see how they can help you to improve your AWS spending.
Overview of Stratusphere™ and AWS Trusted Advisor
Stratusphere™ FinOps
Stratusphere™ FinOps was designed to support large enterprises and private equity firms to optimize their costs. Information is organized for rapid prioritization, so you can see the most low-effort value creation opportunity, and see what elements are performing best.
For private equity firms, you can analyze your dashboards across your portfolio, and how different PortCos performing relative to one another and over time.
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor is a native AWS tool that focuses on cost optimization in the cloud. It improves performance and security for each AWS account. It provides you with automated alerts, recommendations, and dashboard summaries.
What does AWS Trusted Advisor Do?
AWS Trusted Advisor uses 5 pillars to improve your infrastructure and give you recommendations:
1 - Security:
AWS Trusted Advisor does all security-related checks, including:
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) access key rotation,
- IAM password policy requirements,
- Multi-factor authentication on Root account,
- Exposed access keys.
2 - Performance:
The tool also makes sure that all your resources are working well. It checks:
- High Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances,
- Large Number of Amazon EC2 Security Group Rules Applied to an Instance,
- Amazon Route 53 Alias Resource Record Sets,
- CloudFront Header Forwarding and Cache Hit Ratio,
- CloudFront Content Delivery Optimization.
3 - Cost Optimization:
You can use AWS Trusted Advisor to keep an eye on costs with:
- Amazon RDS Idle Instances,
- Low Utilization Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instances,
- Underutilized Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes,
- Unassociated elastic IP addresses.
4 - Fault Tolerance:
Check your resiliency and workloads using Trusted Advisor, these include:
- Amazon EBS Snapshots,
- Amazon RDS Backups,
- Amazon RDS Multi-AZ,
- Amazon EC2 Availability Zone Balance.
5 - AWS Service Quotas:
This dashboard gives you a color-coded graph telling you how much of your provisioned resources you’re using. When you’ve used 80% it flags that resource for you and gives you the breakdown of the limits.
All of these pillars are highlighted in the graphs in your Trusted Advisor Organizational dashboard, also known as the TAO dashboard.
StratusGrid vs. AWS Trusted Advisor: Reporting Capabilities
There are 2 key differences between Stratusphere™ FinOps reports and AWS Trusted Advisor: Scope and Prioritization.
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Scope
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Prioritization
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Recommended Use Case
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Stratusphere™ FinOps
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Focus on FinOps with cloud cost reports
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Customized recommendations based on Level of Effort
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To improve cost optimization
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AWS Trusted Advisor
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Reports on the five pillars
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Manually read data to infer next steps
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Have a broad understanding on your AWS account.
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Scope: Stratusphere™ focuses on FinOps, it shows you your cloud cost reports. AWS Trusted Advisor gives you reports on their 5 pillars - security, performance, cost, fault tolerance, and service quotas.
Prioritization: Stratusphere™ gives you the priority of improvements based on the Level of Effort needed for each change. AWS Trusted Advisor leaves it up to you to decide your priorities.
How Each Tool Helps Businesses Achieve Cost Efficiency
Both tools analyze your AWS usage, based on the tools that you’re using.
The key difference are the insights that Stratusphere™ provides you, such as “Where are my biggest opportunity to save costs?” with a clear, easy to understand graph.
Ease of Integration and Use
Stratusphere™ integrates easily with AWS. You can connect all your AWS accounts to it. The first dashboard takes 24 hours for the data to populate.
You can choose to integrate AWS Trusted Advisor with each workload.
Pros and Cons
Stratusphere™ FinOps and AWS Trusted Advisor has different focuses, here we look at the pros and cons.
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Stratusphere™ FinOps |
AWS Trusted Advisor |
Pros |
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Multi-account dashboard
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Clear data and reporting
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Cons |
- Requires a paid plan
- Takes 24 hours to populate data on first installation
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