Maintaining visibility across your AWS accounts is key to optimizing your environment, ensuring good reliability and performance, and keeping costs in check. Having the technical insights you need to make good business decisions about your AWS services and consumption can be difficult, though, particularly in more complex scenarios. If your organization has multiple accounts or your enterprise has adopted a fast-moving and innovative digital transformation strategy, knowing how things stand may be more challenging than you expected.

That’s where Cloudnexa’s Cloudscan can help.

The Cloudscan solution

There are a wide variety of signals flowing through your infrastructure. Cloudscan—which is available through the AWS Marketplace and offered exclusively to Cloudnexa customers as a complimentary part of our service—brings those inputs together in a single solution to give you visibility into your AWS environments.

Your team may not have the bandwidth to constantly watch for issues, but Cloudscan does. The service conducts continuous, automated audits, helping to uncover opportunities to optimize your AWS environments and ensure your AWS accounts are operating at full efficiency. Cloudscan monitors and aggregates a wide range of metrics and indicators into a simplified view with easy-to-understand graphical reporting on the important elements in your account, including:

• Security
• Performance
• Reliability
• Operational excellence
• Cost optimization

A continuous monitoring solution designed for AWS environments

Your infrastructure is always in motion, and you need a way to keep up with changes. Understanding how factors such as the addition of new software, increased consumption, evolving business needs, emerging cybersecurity risks, and user base growth influence the health and performance of your AWS environment is often tricky.

• Have you strayed from the latest best practices?
• Is your infrastructure still properly protected?
• Are you paying for services you aren’t using?

Gathering and interpreting these insights takes time and pulls your team away from their core activities.

As a long-standing AWS Consulting Partner, we chose to develop our own software to help our customers get the visibility they need to drive more business value through AWS services. To ensure Cloudscan delivers the quality insights our clients expect, it’s been validated by AWS through a foundational technical review. The solution underwent an audit on best practices and capabilities, and successfully passing that process demonstrates Cloudnexa’s deep expertise managing high-performing AWS environments and the Cloudscan service’s close alignment with the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The customer benefits of Cloudscan

Visibility

We know how valuable timely guidance is when you want to understand how your environments are performing. Cloudscan continually scans our customers’ AWS accounts and automatically identifies potential risks or issues that don’t align with best practices. The insights available through the service enable you to provision your resources more efficiently, improve reliability, and remediate security and other risks before they cause problems.

For enterprises with multiple accounts, Cloudscan offers a rollup view that aggregates all of your accounts and regions. You can add custom checks and even export the data in CSV format for use in other analytics tools. Cloudscan conducts read-only reviews against your AWS account without any type of agents and in a way that’s completely nonintrusive.

Cost optimization

Controlling costs is a high priority for many businesses. As modernization reaches farther into the enterprise, you may find it’s more difficult to know who’s using the various software and where technologies may be redundant, underutilized, or even abandoned. Your organization could be missing out on opportunities to more effectively drive user adoption, to leverage additional automations and integrations, and to achieve better results with targeted software that can supplement or replace underperforming solutions.

Cloudscan can show you quick ways to cost optimize your AWS environments, without intrusive actions.

• Would upgrading your instances to the latest types save you money?
• Do you have instances sitting idle, where no one has logged in for weeks or even months?

As consumption patterns continue to shift, enterprises encounter new cost optimization challenges. End user access—to data as well as to core business systems—is expanding. Companies increasingly want to quickly scale operations up or down to respond to customer demands, seasonal changes in sales volumes, and accelerated software development and release cycles. Cloudscan offers valuable capabilities that can help root out waste and uncontrolled spend. Our solution also gives you a way to maintain visibility into cost drivers as your environment scales.

Could your AWS environments be more cost efficient?

If you need better visibility across all of your AWS accounts, or if you want to see where cost optimization opportunities may be slipping through your fingers, our Cloudscan service can help. And because Cloudscan was built as an extension of Cloudnexa’s service delivery, you have an experienced team on your side to assist you in identifying and applying the right actions. The Cloudnexa team offers professional service engagements to remediate issues uncovered by Cloudscan on your behalf. During regular reviews, our team will go over all the issues identified through Cloudscan. We’ll break down remediation status for high-risk and urgent issues, plus discuss findings that may require design or architecting changes, redeployment, or other longer-term action plans.

Learn more about Cloudscan today or contact us for more details on how the right monitoring solutions can empower you to understand and cost optimize your AWS environments.