Knowledge library
The Knowledge library contains product guidance and answers migrated from the Exivity Knowledge Base. For current implementation and deployment instructions, the main product documentation remains authoritative.
Product fundamentals
- Extracting data and Extractors
- How are Accounts created?
- Transformers
- What are Lookups?
- What are Services?
- What is an Account Report?
- What is Metadata?
Cost allocation, reporting, and budgets
- Are users able to set alerts for percentage usage levels? Does altering the budget integrate with in-house tools?
- Can I create budgets for multiple clouds?
- Can the solution manage budgets allocated at the application and resource group and/or subscription level? Can budgets be set by cloud consumption groups with time limits for usage?
- Does Exivity provide visibility into budget limits vs actual spend?
- Does Exivity support automated invoice/bill creation?
- Does Exivity support Budget & Forecast Analysis for different Clouds?
- Does Exivity support Cost Allocation for different Clouds?
- Does Exivity support Cost Allocation for different Clouds?
- Does the solution allocate costs to applications and/or products? Does the solution contain the ability to showback costs to business and application owners?
- Does the solution leverage a fixed, customer-provided allocation formula to allocate cloud costs to applications or products for shared costs?
- Does the solution show variances between budget and actuals? Does the solution analyze trends and forecast future spending in near real time? Does this analysis process work with variable costs?
- Does the tool provide budget threshold alerting, against actual and forecast amounts?
- Does the tool provide support to create chargeback and show back models?
- Does the tool provide visibility into budget limits vs actual spend?
- Does the tool provide visibility into budget limits vs forecast spend
- Does the tool retrieve billing and spend data across different Cloud service providers?
- Does the tool support automated invoice/bill creation?
- Does the tool support Budget & Forecast Analysis for different Clouds?
- Does the tool support KPI and reports for Cost and Budgets?
- Does the tool support run rate forecasting & budget projections?
- Does the tool support trend and variance analysis for Cost & Budgets?
- Does the tool support validation of cost allocation metadata such as tags?
- Does the tool users to cross charge and aggregate cost of shared resources to different business units/areas?
- Does this process enable holding different organizations accountable for spend? Can spending adjustments be made?
Cloud data, optimization, and operations
- Are there specific features that are not currently supported for a specific CSP? If the feature is not fully available across CSPs, is the feature in the pipeline in the next 3-6 months?
- Does the solution connect to public clouds to obtain pricing dynamically? How many public clouds does the solution integrate with at time?
- Does the tool provide automated implementation of recommendations, inc. maintenance window scheduling?
- Does the tool provide basic clean-up recommendations to reduce cost and improve performance?
- Does the tool provide cost saving recommendations for IaaS resources?
- Does the tool provide cost saving recommendations for PaaS resources?
- Does the tool provide cost saving recommendations for SaaS resources?
- Does the tool provide health check alerts for resources?
- Does the tool show reserved instance capacity analysis and provide recommendations?
- Does the tool support automated spot provisioning and management?
- Does the tool support Cloud Usage Optimization for different Clouds?
- Does the tool support Cloud Usage Optimization for different Clouds?
- Does the tool support creating, editing and deleting of metadata irrespective of the underlying CSP?
- Does the tool support cross-provider price comparison and recommendations?
- Does the tool support custom alerts for anomaly detection?
- Does the tool support custom tag validation based on specified character set?
- Does the tool support intelligent anomaly detection in Cloud costs?
- Does the tool support resource provisioning and lifecycle management?
- Does the tool support retrieval of metrics and utilization report for IaaS resources?
- Does the tool support retrieval of metrics and utilization report for PaaS resources?
- Does the tool support retrieval of metrics and utilization report for SaaS resources?
- Does the tool support rightsizing cost recommendations across different CSPs?
- Does the tool support spot market analysis and provide savings recommendations?
- Does the tool support starting, stopping, restarting VMs/Servers at scheduled intervals?
- Does the tool support Tag Management for different Clouds?
- Does the tool support Tag Management for different Clouds?
- Is it possible to discover additional Cloud specific attributes provided by CSPs?
- Is resource discovery supported across CSPs?
- Is resource discovery supported across CSPs?
- Post resource discovery, is logging supported across CSPs such as AWS, Azure, GCP?
- Post resource discovery, is logging supported across CSPs such as AWS, Azure, GCP?
- What other Cloud/traditional IT cost management capabilities does the tool currently support?
Governance, security, and compliance
- Are there security controls in place for client data management?
- Can the solution leverage enterprise security applications and audit controls? Does the tool support authentication, authorization, and audit controls to meet basic accounting requirements?
- Does the tool allow specifying custom compliance audit rules for automated auditing?
- Does the tool integrate with existing security tools such as Active Directory and LDAP?
- Does the tool support automated compliance auditing for CSPs?
- Does the tool support automated compliance remediation?
- Which regulatory standards is the tool compliant with?
Deployment, integrations, and support
- Does the tool support native integration with Change & Incident Management?
- How does the tool offer support for integration and deployment ensuring ease of implementation?
- How frequent are updates and new features released?
- How scalable is Exivity when data volume increases?
- How scalable is the tool when data volume increases?
- What deployment model does your solution support?
- What is your average SLA for resolving tool incidents and customer support tickets?
- What other tool integrations are supported?
Sustainability
- Can the tool handle multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud environments and provide consolidated carbon footprint data?
- Can the tool provide insights (such as trend analysis and forecasting capabilities) into carbon emissions in Cloud operations?
- Does the tool provide recommendations on reducing carbon emissions, optimizing resource usage, adopting energy-efficient configurations, or leveraging renewable energy options?
- How does the tool collect data on Cloud resource usage and energy consumption?
- What is the methodology used to calculate carbon emissions for different types of Cloud resources (e.g., virtual machines, storage, network)?
- What types of reports and visualizations does the tool provide for carbon footprint data?
Product and procurement Q&A
- Are you already offering or developing your solution here or is this not relevant for your solution?
- At a high level, what is your solution?
- How many out-of-the-box use cases are supported? Are any benchmarking algorithms applied for analysis?
- How many users are using the tool?
- Is your solution a single product, multiple integrated products, or a platform? If a platform, do you use your own private network to deliver cloud services?
- Please identify 3-5 areas where you excel compared to your competition. Explain.
- Please identify 3-5 areas where you intend to innovate in the next 12-36 months. Include supporting rationale.
- Please identify 3-5 areas where you need to improve compared to your competition and what you’re doing about it.
- Please identify your 3-4 primary competitors. Explain the reasons why you chose them, and what you are doing to address their competition.
- What emerging technologies do you expect to impact this space in the next 18-36 months? Explain.
- What is the cost/fee structure for the product?
- What is the cost/fees structure for the product?
- What levels of customization is supported in the tool?
- What use cases does your solution support?