From Netflix Inc.’s decision to open-source the Ice utility it uses for tracking internal Amazon Web Services (AWS) consumption to the recent move by Rackspace Inc. to simplify its pricing model, the industry’s collective efforts have helped make the public cloud more transparent than it was just a few years ago.  But although monitoring individual deployments may be easier, many large organizations are still piecing together a holistic view of their environments, looking to gain insight on managed services consumed throughout the various business units.  An IT organization can’t control what it can’t see.

That lack of visibility has given rise to “cloud sprawl”,” a phenomenon wherein a company finds itself paying for cloud resources that are not being actively used. That  problem is only aggravated by the growing trend of workers bypassing the CIO and signing up for services on their own, subscriptions that are often forgotten after use and can potentially add up to a tremendous burden on the bottom line.

RightScale Inc. promises to take out the complexity from optimizing infrastructure expenditure with a new cost management solution aimed at empowering customers to get the biggest bang for their service dollar not only in the public cloud but on-premise as well.

The managed offering, aptly named RightScale Cloud Analytics, is rolling out to general availability after nine months in beta testing. The release greatly expands on the original feature set that was announced for the product when it made its initial debut last November.

RightScale Cloud Analytics now packs extensive notification functionality that allows customers to schedule email reports detailing exactly what they’re paying for across their AWS, Azure and in-house OpenStack deployments on daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The company says that the automated summaries provide insight not only into the bill itself but also usage trends and potential sources of unnecessary costs. If detected, overruns are also made known to managers and finance teams through an integrated alerting function.

For the users interacting with the service directly, the launch version brings with it a new feature for identifying so-called “zombie servers” that are operating smoothly from an infrastructure standpoint but don’t have the RightScale alerting and monitoring scripts turned on for some reason or another, requiring manual action. That heightened detection capability is joined by a built-in tool called Scenario Builder  that makes it possible to compare different services for the best value, forecast the cost of moving specific on-premise applications to the cloud and centrally track the usage of long-term Reserved Instances on AWS.

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