Vantage

The virtual tag feature is critical to our use case of estimating costs per customer. We use the terraform integration to pull in a list of customers and to map that to hundreds of virtual tags that link the cost associated with that customer. This powerful combination of virtual tag and terraform integration allows us to manage our vantage configuration like code and unlock novel ways of looking at our data through different groupings. Vantage also allows you to group by many different aspects; when we evaluated competitors in the space many of them (including AWS and Azure's cost reporting tools) were limited to 3 groupings or less which was very limiting. With Vantage, we can group by cloud, account, region, and several other tags all at once.

1. AI-Native Cost Management: Vantage is ahead with integrations across major LLM service providers. As we scale our AI initiatives, having a single view of LLM costs alongside traditional costs is critical. 2. Granular Container Visibility: The Kubernetes integration allows us to break down cluster costs further and more finely tune our resource allocations against real customer workloads. This even provides us with insights to refine our load testing and benchmarking. 3. Extensible ecosystem: The breadth of available data sources (Databricks, Snowflake, Mondo, Datadog, etc.) gives us confidence that as our stack evolves, Vantage will remain our central source of truth for all infrastructure and SaaS costs.

What we value most about Vantage is its ability to provide unified, real-time cost visibility across all three major cloud provides in a single, intuitive platform. The allocation and tagging model is flexible and accurate, allowing us to map cloud spend directly to teams, products and environments with minimal overhead. The dashboards and reporting capabilities are clear, actionable and easy to consume by both engineering and finance stakeholders, which significantly improves alignment and decision-making. The combination of strong product capabilities and highly professional, responsive team makes Vantage a standout solution for multi-cloud cost management.

When combining data with AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes the costs covered by the Kubernetes provider are duplicated. This leads to confusion when trying to make reports that show overall costs. We've worked around this by keeping kubernetes and AWS/Azure reports separate. It would be ideal if there was an easier way to exclude all costs from the AWS and Azure providers that is covered by the kubernetes provider. We've used virtual tags to create tags that span AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes but using them in cost reports can be a big pain. If you want to filter down by Virtual Tag 1 for all providers, you must duplicate that filter across all three providers which is tedious and difficult to explain to more casual users who would like to do some simple filtering in existing reports. In cost reports, when you sort by columns other than cost it only sorts within the current page of results. This can be incredibly confusing for our use case where we have hundreds of different tags and want to sort by some other feature such as cluster or region.

1. Automation support for managing through terraform requires vendor support to be able to be successful with complex/realistic deployments. 2. Reactive support model: Support is reliable but lacks the proactivity found in other top-tier vendors. It can sometimes feel like a struggle to get timely support on complex issues. 3. UI Density: The platform is feature rich as a strength, but can lead to a dense interface that requires new users some rampup time to get the most out of it.

There are very few drawbacks, but like any evolving platform there are areas for continued improvement. First, some advanced automation and policy-driven cost controls could be expanded to further reduce manual intervention at scale. Second, while reporting is strong, additional customization options for executive-level and cross-functional views would be beneficial. Third, continued expansion of native integrations and APIs would further streamline adoption in highly complex enterprise environments. None of these items have materially impacted our overall experience, but they represent opportunities for future enhancements.