Industry: Marketing and advertising
NextRoll, the parent company of AdRoll and RollWorks, is a marketing technology company delivering products that ambitious marketers use and rely on to grow their businesses. To deliver value for its customers and keep its solutions optimized, NextRoll’s software developers are continuously running tests and spinning up new applications – sometimes causing cloud costs to spike steeply.
On NextRoll’s business side, a small team of finance analysts uses Yotascale to keep an eye on these costs. The analysts can view alerts via an integration with Slack, allowing the team to stay on top of cloud costs with a minimum time commitment. Over time, the team learned temporary spikes are common, but with longer-term or very large spikes, a quick conversation with developers can reveal reasons behind the spikes and associated costs. In some cases, Yotascale flags cloud usage and cost anomalies that developers aren’t even aware of, allowing finance analysts to eliminate unnecessary costs.
“Yotascale’s integration with Slack makes all the difference for our finance team. We don’t need to go looking for cost anomalies – they come to us.”
Adam Wire
Lead Financial Analyst
NextRoll
The Challenges
- Prevent cost management from impeding the software development process
- Reduce costs through usage monitoring and discovery of redundant or unused infrastructure
- Help developers incorporate cloud costs into their decision-making when needed
The Solution
- NextRoll uses Yotascale to measure, forecast, and optimize cloud usage and costs.
- Yotascale’s Slack integration sends timely alerts to the finance team for faster resolution.
- Yotascale Anomaly Detection quickly steers analysts to the application, user, or product responsible for cost and usage increases.
The Results
- In the first year of using Yotascale, NextRoll was able to immediately identify cost‑anomaly alerts totaling over $363K to ensure those costs were expected, and take action if needed.
- Business analysts stay on top of cloud costs through easy-to-manage alerts.
- The discovery of expired or redundant deployments results in immediate cost savings.
- With Yotascale, NextRoll can raise engineers’ awareness of cloud resource costs, so engineers can take ownership of cloud budgets.
- Yotascale’s AI models catch cost spikes in real time and provide immediate root cause analysis, increasing business agility.