Financial Governance with Maestro: Track and Reduce

In our previous post, we briefly introduced Gartner's Framework for Managing and Optimizing Cots of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS and started the overview of Maestro as a financial governance tool - from the first step, Planning.

Once planning is completed and the actual infrastructure is deployed to Cloud, it's time to start with the second step - Tracking.

Step 2: Track

Establishing the visibility of Cloud spending is the next step in our journey. Effective tracking needs effective organization of the costs review and proper reaction to anomalies.


Maestro has a big set of cost and performance tracking tools and mechanisms that can be used for costs optimization.

  • Even though Maestro supports different cloud providers, it brings the tenants organization to unified terminology, without breaking the native hierarchy. Any Cloud resource, event, or cost record can be easily detected and identified as that belonging to a specific cloud, tenant and region. This simplifies further review and optimization.

  • Maestro allows Tagging the resources via its UI and CLI tools. Tags allow to break down the costs by specific groups of resources, as well as set up tag-based Budgets to make sure that the specific group does not exceed the expected cost limit.

  • Maestro collects, analyzes and shares with users dozens of metrics – starting from instance-level performance up to tenant-level indicators. To make all this information clear and applicable for infrastructure optimization purposes, Maestro not only shares the numbers and graphs “as is”, but also analyzes the collected data and provides optimization suggestions, based on them.

    For example, there is a Low Instance Utilization report notifying user about the low CPU and Network activity on an instance, or Idle ELBs report that informs about load balancers that have not received much traffic or were shut down.

    And, of course, Maestro tracks each tenants expenses in the real-life mode and informs the users about the Budgets utilization levels and exceeded daily expense thresholds.


  • Although Anomalies detection in Maestro still has areas for improvement, it is mature enough to be used within infrastructure and costs optimization flows. For example, the Budget notifications, sent at the specific extent of Budget utilization, allow you to see if the monthly cost grows faster than it is expected. The Unexpected Activities report is the reaction to the excessive resources amount growth and allows to react immediately and stop the expansion in case the activity is not authorized.

  • Maestro collects the billing information from all supported cloud providers and organizes it in a unified way for convenient review. This is done in a real-time mode, all updates are displayed in Maestro within minutes after they become available on the respective platform.

    The user can see costs for their cloud/tenant/region or tag, both total, or with breakdown by provided services – at any time.

    Technically, Maestro allows modifying the data received from the cloud providers to adjust the costs that are shown to the end-users.

 Step 3: Reduce

Using the collected information about infrastructure state, performance and current cost, you have enough background to start implementing cost reduction approaches.


Maestro has a wide set of tools that can facilitate this process effectively.

  • As it was mentioned above, Maestro collects dozens of metrics across virtual infrastructures under its control. It analyzes the data and produces various Resource optimization reports to inform the users about possible optimization points. These reports are based on analytics produced by internal Maestro engines, as well as on the information retrieved from the native cloud providers’ services (for example, AWS Cost and Usage reports). Using these reports, the users can review the possibly forgotten and underutilized resources.

  • Maestro has an in-built Scheduling service which allows you to set up automatic instances start/stop. The schedule can be applied not only to explicitly specified list of instances, but also to all instances belonging to the user, as well as to all instances having the same tag – so that you can start/stop the whole specific environment at once.



  • Although the selection of purchase options and getting discounts for specific accounts is outside of Maestro functionality, Maestro keeps track of the AWS instances purchase options you use and shares the statistics, which can be one of the sources for optimization concerns.

    Within the infrastructure analytics, Maestro also checks the generations of instances and storage volumes used on your AWS accounts. It shares the lists of resources that can be migrated to newer generations, and suggests the expected costs savings that can result from such migration.

Let's make a pause here and get some coffee. The final steps - Optimize and Evolve are coming soon in our next post 

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