Simplistic yet Powerful BI tool for collaboration and forecasting!
May 12, 2022
Simplistic yet Powerful BI tool for collaboration and forecasting!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Board
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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
- 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.
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.