Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring Company Case Study

How a leading cloud monitoring company reduced AWS costs by 50% in dev/qa environments

50%
Cost Reduction
$180K
Annual Savings
3 Months
Time to ROI
15+
AWS Regions Monitored

Company Overview

Our client is a rapidly growing cloud monitoring and observability platform provider serving enterprise customers across multiple industries. With a distributed team of 200+ engineers, they operate extensive development and QA environments across multiple AWS regions to support their continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

Company Profile

  • Industry: Cloud Monitoring & Observability
  • Company Size: 500+ employees
  • Engineering Team: 200+ developers
  • AWS Presence: 15+ regions globally
  • Infrastructure: 500+ EC2 instances, 200+ RDS databases

Environment Details

  • Development environments: 8 regions
  • QA/Testing environments: 7 regions
  • Monthly AWS spend: $360,000 (dev/qa)
  • Active resources: 1,000+ at any time
  • Daily deployments: 50-100 per day

The Challenge

The company was experiencing rapidly escalating AWS costs in their development and QA environments. Despite having a talented engineering team, they lacked visibility into resource utilization and cost attribution. Key challenges included:

Resource Wastage Pattern

150+ Idle EC2 Instances

80+ Unattached EBS Volumes

25+ Unused Elastic IPs

↓

$360K Monthly Spend

In Dev/QA Environments

Key Pain Points

  • No visibility into per-team resource usage
  • Developers forgetting to terminate test instances
  • Orphaned EBS volumes after instance termination
  • Unattached Elastic IPs accumulating charges
  • Over-provisioned RDS instances running 24/7
  • No automated alerts for cost anomalies

Business Impact

  • $360K monthly AWS spend for non-production
  • Finance team demanding cost reductions
  • Manual cost analysis taking 10+ hours/week
  • No accountability for resource usage
  • Budget overruns every quarter
  • Limited funds for production infrastructure

"We were burning cash on idle resources 24/7. Our dev teams had no idea how much their test environments were costing us. We needed immediate visibility and automated alerts to get this under control."

— Director of Cloud Operations

The Solution

The company deployed CalCloudSpendIQ across all their AWS development and QA environments. The implementation was completed in just 2 days with zero disruption to their development workflows.

CalCloudSpendIQ Implementation Architecture

CalCloudSpendIQ

↓

Daily Cost Reports

Smart Alerts

Resource Inventory

↓

EC2 Monitoring

EBS Tracking

RDS Analysis

IP Management

Implementation Steps

  • CloudFormation deployment in 30 minutes
  • Configured monitoring for 15 AWS regions
  • Set up daily email reports to team leads
  • Established cost alert thresholds
  • Integrated with Slack for notifications
  • Created cost dashboards for finance team

Key Features Utilized

  • Real-time AWS pricing via Pricing API
  • Multi-region resource scanning
  • Unattached resource identification
  • Automated daily HTML email reports
  • Cost trend analysis and forecasting
  • Resource tagging and cost allocation
Week 1-2

Discovery & Setup

Deployed CalCloudSpendIQ, configured regions, established baselines

Month 1

Quick Wins

Identified and terminated 150 idle instances, removed 80 unattached volumes. Savings: 15%

Month 2-3

Process Changes

Implemented auto-shutdown policies, developer training. Savings: 30%

Month 6

Optimization Maturity

Right-sized instances, optimized RDS usage. Savings: 45%

Month 12

Sustained Excellence

Fully optimized environment with continuous monitoring. Savings: 50%

Results & ROI

Monthly AWS Spend: Before vs. After (Dev/QA Environments)

$360K
Before CalCloudSpendIQ
$180K
After CalCloudSpendIQ

12-Month ROI Summary

50%
Cost Reduction
$180K
Monthly Savings
$2.16M
Annual Savings
1,080x
Return on Investment

Total Investment: ~$2,000 (CalCloudSpendIQ setup + AWS infrastructure costs)
Payback Period: Less than 1 day

Quantifiable Results

  • 50% reduction in dev/qa AWS spending
  • $2.16M saved in the first year
  • 150+ idle EC2 instances identified
  • 80+ unattached EBS volumes removed
  • 25+ unused Elastic IPs released
  • 40+ oversized RDS instances right-sized

Operational Improvements

  • 95% reduction in manual cost analysis time
  • 100% visibility into resource usage
  • Team accountability through daily reports
  • Proactive alerts preventing cost spikes
  • Finance team satisfied with cost controls
  • Freed up budget for production scaling

"CalCloudSpendIQ paid for itself in less than a day. We're now saving $180,000 every single month. The daily reports have created a culture of cost awareness across our entire engineering organization. Best investment we've made this year."

— VP of Engineering

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