"We're talking about a very chaotic and volatile market," Wagner says. That, he says, leads to customers misunderstanding their actual costs and cloud consumption.

So just how is an enterprise to know which resources to get? Each business's situation is different but Wagner says generally if a business's service is up and running in the cloud for more than 40% of a year, then a reserved instance is likely a more efficient option than on-demand. The key, he says, is to have clear visibility into an enterprise's compute power and cloud usage, which Cloudyn and other cloud services providers offer in. Cloudyn's SaaS application tracks an enterprise's computing usage and its cloud purchases. Other services providers in the area include Uptime Software, Newvem and Cloud Cruiser.

Staten says cloud monitoring and provision analysis tools are an emerging field that he expects to become more competitive in future years as cloud adoption continues to increase. "As the economics of cloud platforms becomes more well understood we will see more demand for these types of tools and I would expect to see cost trackers added to traditional management tools," he says.

This article originally appeared at NetworkWorld.com. Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social media. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.