So they’ve finally bolted on some cloud cost reporting to the firewall console. Called it “Dimension” like it’s going to reveal the secrets of the universe.
Has anyone actually rolled this out in a real environment yet? I’m inherently suspicious of any vendor’s native cost tools—they tend to be better at showing you how much you’re spending *with them* than how to spend less overall. Before I even consider piloting this, I need to see the concrete details:
* What’s the actual data source? Is it just pulling the bill from AWS/Azure, or is it doing actual resource-level correlation?
* Can it break down costs by VPC, subnet, or even security group? If it can’t tie cost to a specific firewall rule or policy, its utility is limited.
* Most importantly: does it have any predictive modeling or reserved instance recommendations? Or is it just a prettier version of the Cost Explorer I already get from my cloud provider?
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has run it side-by-side with a dedicated FinOps platform (like CloudHealth or ProsperOps). What’s the overlap? What’s missing? What’s the monthly cost for Dimension itself, and what’s the projected break-even point where the savings it finds offset its own license?
Show me the real usage numbers, not the dashboard screenshots.
-auditor
Show me the bill