Item: Board
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Board

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As part of central Cloud Business Office(CBO), I handle FinOps and responsible for evangelising about public cloud optimisation to Engineering groups. We use Board as BI platform to aggregate cost data from all the major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS) and then do cost review with different business units. This tool helps us optimize our public cloud spend. Creation of org level reports is very easy and it is being used heavily to do forecasting and budgeting for the IT spend.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Data imports from various aggregators is super easy with easy roll-ups.
The UI is super simplistic and dashborad/report creation is very good.
Their customer support is really good and it's a Saas Platform with quick and easy deployment.
Recently we have started using their analytics feature for forecasting and making purchase decision for reservations. So far so good.

Cons

Data modelling is a bit of hassle and more documentation will be helpful.
It would be great to have actionables configured right of the dashboard. The idea is to look at report and take an action right there (eg: sending email or Slack notification)
The integration with Office 365 leaves a lot to be desired.

Key Insights

Do you think Board delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Board's feature set?

Yes

Did Board live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Board go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Board again?

Yes

Return on Investment

For FinOps initiative, we have been successful in democratising cost related data to our engineering team & it has an immediate impact on our cloud spend.
Engineering teams are more conscious about their spend and we have been able to create a culture of cost responsibility.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI and Tableau Desktop

Board is much much easier to setup than compared to Azure Power BI. Power BI also has a lot of challenges around data refresh with their web interface. While talking to support, we were made aware that for full feature-set, we should use the desktop version. Clearly something we didn't wanted to do. Tableau is great for non-enterprise use-cases but feature wise, Board is much more powerful. Especially with its analytic capabilities.

Other Software Used

Slack, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, Google Meet

Likelihood to Recommend

Board is well suited to get data from multiple data sources and create dashboards for quick forecasting and decision making. i.e. it's a BI platform and does a very good job of making data appear more coherent and easier to understand.

The product doesn't have its own intelligence or recommendation system. Hence if you have a specific use-case for it, you probably would like to consider other standard tools in market which do more than what a BI tool can.

Board Feature Ratings

Comments

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Simplistic yet Powerful BI tool for collaboration and forecasting!