Cloud Cost Management Quick Start Guide

Kieron Dean · ‎10-09-2024

Welcome to the Cloud Cost Management Quick Start Guide

If you're just starting your Cloud Cost Management journey, then you've come to the right place. This guide will help you get up to speed on activating and realizing value from ServiceNow® Cloud Cost Management and is a great place to come back to as our products evolve over time. For a quick overview, watch this video:

Guide Overview:

Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide:

Cloud Cost Management overview
What are the business outcomes you can expect?
What to know before getting started?
Steps to quick success
Demos and other helpful resources

Cloud Cost Management

The Cloud Cost Management application gives you visibility and control of your cloud usage and costs and helps you to discover all your cloud resources, breaks down cloud spend by cost center, business service, and other entity, provides recommendations on how to reduce cloud spend, and automates repetitive cost optimization tasks.

What are the business outcomes you can expect from Cloud Cost Management?

Before you start to implement Cloud Cost Management, it’s critical to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. Cloud Cost Management allows you to deliver several positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realise these goals.

Cloud Cost Management benefits:

Gain predictable cloud spending: Optimise your operations using platform native integration with service management remediation workflows. Identify the gaps and take immediate action.
Consolidate IT and cloud management: Automate workflows and manage cloud costs with system-driven cost-saving recommendations.
Reduce cloud costs: Gain complete visibility into your total public cloud spend and take steps to prevent waste.
Manage multi-cloud budgets with accountability: Create detailed weekly, monthly and quarterly budgets. Perform show-backs and chargebacks, track your spending and make informed decisions.
Minimise errors stemming from cloud tasks: From provisioning to retirement, reduce manual processes by automating cloud tasks.

Before You Get Started

Before you get started with Cloud Cost Management, check and consider the following:

Customer Type

This guide is designed for new customers who are starting their journey to optimize their cloud spend and gain visibility and control of their cloud assets.

Feature Type

If you’re not already on the latest ServiceNow release, we strongly recommend that you upgrade before you begin development in CCM. By upgrading, you get new ServiceNow innovations into the hands of your users faster, get access to the latest performance and security enhancements, and ensure that support is there when you need it. To make your upgrade smooth and successful, take a look at these upgrade resources.

Organization Involvement

Roles & Personas (Stakeholders):

CIO
VP of IT Ops
CCOE (Cloud Center of Excellence)
Cloud Ops
FinOps Leader

Steps to quick success

Explore the documentation listed below to get started.
Explore the CCM Getting Started video get a brief overview of how the product will work in your environment.
Consider your options for implementation:
1. Many ServiceNow customers work with a certified ServiceNow partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for their CCM implementation since CCM involves business processes and disciplines they are not familiar with. It also accelerates rollout and helps customers achieve their goals faster.
2. If you have chosen to work with a partner but haven’t selected a partner yet, this document will help you develop your ServiceNow partner strategy. Make sure that the partner uses Now Create, ServiceNow’s library of more than 700 leading implementation practices, since this accelerates your time to value and reduces risk. Check out our Partner Finder to find a CCM-certified partner or talk to your ServiceNow account representative about ServiceNow Expert Services. We can also work with your chosen certified partner to infuse our expertise into your implementation through our ServiceNow Co-Delivery service offering.
3. If you are planning to self-implement, you need to give your team the skills they need to succeed. Check out the links below:
We strongly recommend that you take a phased approach (i.e. crawl, walk, run) to CCM implementation, so you achieve your most important business outcomes first, accelerate time to value, and avoid over-complicating your initial rollout.

CCM Documentation: (product page) (datasheet) (product documentation)