Putting three billing consoles into one portal

Nobody can tell you what the organisation spent on cloud last month without opening three tools

The problem

Multi-cloud is rarely a decision anyone made in one go. A team standardised on AWS, an acquisition arrived on Azure, a data science group started on GCP because of a specific service, and each of those choices was reasonable. What accumulates is three billing consoles that do not agree on anything. Each one names its services differently, groups charges differently, applies discounts on its own terms, and closes its billing period on its own schedule.

The usual answer

So the total gets assembled by hand. Someone exports from each console, maps categories to something comparable, converts currencies, works out which line items are equivalent, and produces a spreadsheet. It takes days, it is out of date when it is finished, and it exists in one person's file. Nobody can answer a question about last month's spend without going back to that person. Questions that ought to be routine, like which product line costs the most to run or whether spend is growing faster than usage, are hard enough that they get asked once a quarter instead of continuously.

How we approach it

Nimbus Stream connects to AWS, Azure and GCP and pulls cost data from each into one portal. Dashboards are built from the combined data with as many gadgets as needed, line, bar or pie, on linear or logarithmic axes, and the filters that produced a view are saved so the next person does not rebuild it. Reports cover on-demand, reserved instance and savings plan usage across all three providers in the same place.

What changes

The total is available whenever someone needs it. Comparisons across providers become possible because the data sits in one shape, and the monthly assembly job disappears along with the dependency on the person who used to do it.