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Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before they connect an account

Setup time, cloud coverage, credential handling, remediation safety, and how Varcio compares to the tools you may already be running. If something here is not answered, our team will tell you plainly where a capability is still maturing.

Getting started

Setup time, trials, and what you need before you connect an account.

How long does setup take?

Connecting a cloud account takes a few guided steps using each provider’s own trust model: an IAM role on AWS, a Service Principal on Azure, a service account key on Google Cloud and an API signing key on OCI. Findings appear from the first scan after you connect, and you can add policies and integrations as you go.

Can I try it for free?

Yes — every new signup gets a free trial with premium capabilities unlocked. No credit card is required, and you can choose the right paid tier from the pricing page when you are ready.

Do I need to install anything?

Varcio is a web application, so most teams do not install anything locally. The optional GitHub App and Kubernetes agent are one-time setup steps. The agent needs metrics-server in the cluster and is available on Business and Enterprise plans.

Does it work with multi-account organizations?

Yes. Explorer covers 1 account on 1 provider. Pro allows 3 accounts per provider across unlimited providers, 10 members, and 3 workspaces. Business scales to 10 accounts per provider, 50 members, and 10 workspaces. Enterprise is unlimited on all three.

Cloud & platform coverage

Which clouds, orchestrators, and infrastructure-as-code workflows are supported.

Does Varcio support AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and Kubernetes in one platform?

Yes — five infrastructure surfaces are first-class: AWS (102 detectors), Azure (73), GCP (59), OCI (38), and Kubernetes (21), plus 23 cross-cloud detectors. That is 316 active detectors in total.

Do you support Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)?

Yes. OCI connects with an API signing key, encrypted at rest, and 38 OCI detectors run over the Usage API, Cost and Usage Reports, Monitoring, Resource Search, Cloud Advisor, Cloud Guard and Budgets. Ten OCI remediation types are available, such as stopping idle instances, deleting unattached volumes and making public buckets private, along with parking for instances and instance pools. Universal Credits commitments are modelled, not purchased. AWS still has the widest remediation set, and we will always tell you plainly where a capability is narrower on one cloud than another.

Do you support Kubernetes?

Yes. Connect through Kubecost, OpenCost, the native Kubernetes API with a bearer token, or the bundled in-cluster agent. The agent pushes metrics outbound and needs no inbound cluster access; the Kubecost, OpenCost and native API modes need an endpoint Varcio can reach. Container cost is allocated to namespace, deployment, and team, using team, owner or cost-center labels, with rightsizing derived from measured utilisation.

Can Varcio analyze Terraform changes before deployment?

Yes. PR Cost Review prices Terraform changes against live provider pricing and comments on the pull request before merge. The CI/CD Control Tower extends this to whole pipelines and deployments, linking them to their cost consequences.

Does it monitor databases?

Yes. The Database Health module provides deep operational monitoring for managed databases — connections, storage, latency, replication lag, and query performance — alongside the cost view.

Can it track AI and machine learning costs?

Yes. The AI Infrastructure module provides dedicated cost and waste analysis for ML and generative-AI workloads across Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Azure OpenAI.

Monitoring, assessment & migration

Uptime and real-user monitoring, cloud assessment, deployment and migration, and AI and software spend.

Does Varcio monitor uptime and run a status page?

Yes. Service Monitoring checks the services, domains and regions you run across connected clouds, opens incidents once and closes them on recovery, tracks reliability objectives and error budgets, and publishes a status page that never exposes URLs, regions or error messages. It is available from the Pro plan.

Does Varcio offer real user monitoring, and does it use cookies?

Yes. Real User Monitoring reads traffic from your connected cloud logs with nothing to install, or from an optional snippet for Core Web Vitals, errors, funnels and goals. It sets no cookies, records no sessions, scrubs identifiers on the server and respects Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. It is available from the Pro plan.

Can Varcio assess my cloud estate?

Yes. Cloud Assessment scores a connected estate and exports a board-ready, evidence-backed assessment without deploying or migrating anything. Each completed assessment is saved so you can compare over time and reopen a past report.

Can Varcio help me migrate between clouds?

Yes. Deploy & Migration compares AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and hybrid deployment paths with costs, generates AWS-ready Terraform or OpenTofu blueprints, and the migration module moves a workload with source and target readiness, waves and cutover evidence. Our Cloud Services team can also run the migration with you.

Can I move from CloudHealth to Varcio?

Yes. Varcio can import your CloudHealth perspectives, organisation units, roles and policies, then run beside CloudHealth so you can compare the numbers before you switch.

How does Varcio track AI spend?

AI Infrastructure covers findings and actions for SageMaker, Bedrock, Vertex AI and Azure OpenAI, and AI Economics traces every AI token and dollar, including direct OpenAI and Anthropic usage, to the team, service and feature that owns it, with cost per request and per million tokens.

Can Varcio find unused SaaS and AI seats?

Yes. Software Spend is a register of SaaS licences and AI tools by the seat, with idle, unmeasured, over-provisioned and true-up measures and a renewals view. GitHub and Okta can be pulled live, and other tools are imported by CSV.

Security & safety

Credential handling, audit trails, and the guardrails around automated action.

Is my data safe?

Yes. AWS uses IAM AssumeRole with no static access keys stored. Azure, GCP and OCI credentials are stored with AWS KMS envelope encryption and are never exposed in logs or UI responses. Write actions need permissions you grant, pass approval or Autopilot’s limits, and are recorded in an immutable audit log.

What if auto-remediation breaks something?

Each live change passes policy evaluation and rollout-safety gates: step-up approval for high blast-radius changes, a rollback success floor, and a maintenance window for larger changes. If a gate is not met, the run drops to a dry run. Requested changes need explicit approval. Autopilot, if you turn it on, can act without a person above a confidence threshold, but resources that look production, public, critical or deletion-protected go to approval, and a monthly action budget caps what it does. Supported changes can be rolled back, and every step lands in an immutable audit log.

Which compliance frameworks are covered?

The Compliance module maps findings to controls in 8 frameworks: CIS AWS, CIS Azure, CIS Google Cloud, SOC 2, PCI DSS v4.0, ISO 27001:2022, NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 and Cloud Well-Architected, with evidence export. Mapping is not certification. Access is enforced by two independent server-side permission layers, and the audit log records every action by a user, Apex, Autopilot, or a scheduled job.

What AI models do you use?

Apex routes across multiple model providers, selecting per task class and falling back when one is unavailable. Forecasting runs three candidate models (a seasonal regression model, a classical time-series model, and a seasonal-naive benchmark with drift), scores each on rolling out-of-sample backtests against your own history, and selects the winner automatically, with error metrics shown rather than hidden. The benchmark means a forecast is always available. Forecasts show 80% intervals over horizons of 14 to 120 days.

Evaluation & alternatives

How Varcio fits next to the tools you may already be running.

What is FinOps software?

FinOps software helps engineering, finance, and operations teams understand, govern, and optimize cloud spend. Varcio combines cost visibility, forecasting, policy controls, PR analysis, waste detection, and approval-gated remediation in one platform.

How much of the platform is there, really?

51 modules across 14 sections — AI & Automation, Insights, Optimization, Workloads, Engineering, Cost & Spend, Planning, Govern, Marketplace, Security, Admin, Connections, Account, and Help & Updates — backed by 316 active detectors and a nine-stage data lifecycle running from Connect through to Emit.

How is this different from CloudHealth?

Varcio offers multi-cloud visibility, AI intelligence, PR cost analysis, and automated remediation in one platform, with a more accessible self-serve starting tier than traditional enterprise-only FinOps tooling.

Still have a question?

Start a free trial and see it against your own environment, or talk to our team about your specific multi-cloud setup.