About Logz.io

Logz.io offers a unified, scalable SaaS platform that combines the best of open-source monitoring tools to provide real-time information on the health, performance, and security of all business-critical applications. Serving clients across industries including financial services, e-commerce, IoT and more, Logz.io empowers DevOps teams to identify, investigate, and remediate production issues and security incidents quickly and efficiently. With simplified observability, Logz.io users can leverage high-quality data and advanced analytics to troubleshoot faster. The unified view of log, metric and trace data all in one platform makes it easy to filter out unnecessary data and reduce costs.

Logz.io’s FinOps Challenge

Logz.io operates in a complex tech environment with a multitude of services used by over 1300 customers. As the company has grown, in particular over the last 2 years, their cloud-spend has increased significantly. On the one hand, this is a positive sign, indicating an increase in customers and growth in popularity of the product. On the other hand, it was clear to company management that unnecessary spending was taking place and a solution was needed to better monitor and identify cost drivers and track cost efficiency.

A FinOps team was formed and tasked with finding a solution. They considered creating their own tool, but quickly realized how much work and complexity was involved. With hundreds of customers all using various cloud-service providers, manually sifting through the data to determine which customers are using each components and how all the costs breakdown is a huge task beyond the team’s capabilities and available time. They realized that if their goal is to increase cost efficiency for the company, they needed to find an existing tool that could help rather than investing time in developing their own solution.

With more than 80 engineers in the company, the Logz.io team was looking for the ideal FinOps solution that would enable the analysts to obtain the information they need while also providing the same visibility to engineers. This would result in greater accountability for their spending. They wanted to create a situation in which everyone could be on the same page, working towards the same goal of providing the best service for their customers while also being cost-efficient and contributing to the company’s overall bottom line.

Why Finout?

Finout’s ability to consolidate costs from all cloud providers into one dashboard, AKA Finout’s MegaBill, can be broken down based on specified parameters which makes it the perfect solution for Logz.io. The flexibility offered by customized dashboards was exactly what Logz.io was looking for. The customized dashboards enable employees to view only the relevant data, sorted in a way that aligns with their specific usage and needs.

The Results of Onboarding Finout’s Cloud Observability Platform

In the first year of using Finout, Logz.io AWS cloud bills decreased by more than 30%. They achieved these cost-savings primarily by leveraging Finout’s virtual tags solution and customized dashboards which provided them with clear visibility into their cloud spend and usage. Using these features, Logz.io were able to allocate 98% of their costs. Using virtual tags allowed Logz.io FinOps team to sort their spending down to the most granular per-component level. They were able to not only see the overall cost of a particular component in their pipeline, but they could drill down even further and see which services the component was using. This way, they could identify the biggest cost drivers and begin to determine which costs were justified and which needed to be investigated further.

Logz.io's operational process works in a way that a dedicated squad manages each component. Although components infra are shared resources using Finout's solution, Logz.IO can still allocate the costs per squad with a k8s cost center. From there, the FinOps team set up virtual dashboards for each squad so that they could see all of the data relevant to their specific components. With this information readily available on a daily basis, developers could easily track and manage the costs associated with their cloud usage and collaborate with business analysts to find ways to reduce the cost.

Creating customized dashboards has become an integral part of the workflow when developing a new feature. During the testing stage, the dashboard is used to determine how accurate (or inaccurate) the original costing forecasts were in order to make better and more informed decisions whether to continue with the feature or abandon it. The data provided by Finout continues to be crucial during the rollout stage, and has proven its worth over and over. For example, during an initial small regional rollout of a new feature that had been in development for 3 months, an unexpected large cost was identified. The ability to identify this cost and then quickly drill down and determine exactly what was causing it allowed the team to find a solution that reduced this cost by 90%.

Finout has become a widely-used tool throughout the organization, bringing the developers and business analysts to a new level of collaboration leading to cost-effectiveness.