VMware CloudHealth, a first-generation cloud management platform, has a strong legacy of delivering value for customers. But, since being acquired by VMware in 2018, innovation within the CloudHealth platform has not kept pace with the evolution of cloud cost management and FinOps practices, and with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware looming, the outlook for CloudHealth is increasingly uncertain.
What Is VMware Tanzu CloudHealth?
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is a cloud cost management software for over 20,000 worldwide organizations. Designed to optimize and help manage your multicloud setup, VMware Tanzu CloudHealth provides toolsets and dashboards designed to optimize and simplify, though, as mentioned above, their ability to keep pace with the modern needs of the cloud has declined since their 2018 acquisition.
Key Features of VMware Tanzu CloudHealth
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth includes a wide array of capabilities to help improve your multicloud experience, including:
- AI-powered forecasting and budget management
- Multicloud reporting and dashboards
- Anomaly detection
- Kubernetes optimization
- Migration planning recommendations
- GreenOps
- Cost chargeback and allocation
Elad Aharoni
VP Customer Success, Anodot
Elad leverages over 20 years of experience to drive customer success, ensuring top-tier deployment, support, and success services in Telco and SaaS.
TIPS FROM THE EXPERT
1. Check for real-time anomaly detection capabilities
A good cloud cost management platform should have advanced anomaly detection to identify irregular spending patterns in real-time. Look for solutions that not only detect anomalies but also provide actionable alerts, enabling quick responses to potential overspending or resource misuse.
2. Consider the depth of multicloud visibility
As most organizations operate in multicloud environments, choose a platform that provides deep visibility across all cloud services and infrastructures, including Kubernetes. This allows for comprehensive monitoring and cost optimization across all cloud resources in use.
3. Investigate the extent of savings recommendations
Look for a platform that offers a wide range of actionable savings recommendations. These should include rightsizing resources, identifying idle instances, and optimizing storage and compute resources. Anodot, for example, provides over 80 real-time savings recommendations, ensuring that no cost-saving opportunity is overlooked.
4. Evaluate ease of integration with existing systems
Integration with your existing cloud infrastructure and financial systems is essential for a seamless experience. Look for platforms that offer robust APIs and easy integration capabilities to ensure quick deployment and minimal disruption to your workflows.
5. Examine the flexibility in cost allocation and reporting
Ensure the platform supports granular cost allocation, allowing you to assign costs to specific departments, projects, or teams. The ability to generate customized reports for different stakeholders is also critical for transparency and accountability in cloud spending.
Getting Started with VMware Tanzu CloudHealth
How you start working with VM Tanzu CloudHealth depends on your current cloud account setup. For example, if you’re working with Kubernetes, your setup will look like you are either using a helm chart to automatically deploy the Tanzu CloudHealth collector or deploying the Tanzu CloudHealth Collector to each individual cluster, though this varies depending on your deployment file.
Using the helm chart will call the Tanzu CloudHealth collector to gather your environment metadata. You’ll need the following prerequisites if you want to use this approach:
- Helm 3.0+
- Kubernetes version 1.12 or later
- Administrator privileges for deploying Tanzu CloudHealth collector in your cluster
If you use the other option of deploying Tanzu CloudHealth into each cluster using a deployment file, you’ll need to manually configure a collector for each cluster. This is the only option for you if you’re using an older Kubernetes version.
On the other hand, your VMware Tanzu CloudHealth setup can look completely different if you’re looking to set up your AWS account or your GCP account. Make sure to carefully review the rules for each to ensure you’re establishing CloudHealth correctly.
Limitations of VMware Tanzu CloudHealth
Beyond the obvious limitations of VMware Tanzu CloudHealth of complicated and differing setup depending on your toolset, there are many other drawbacks:
- Only a few basic savings recommendations
- Limited K8 visibility
- Laggy features
- Unintuitive toolset
- Forecasts and budgeting can be inaccurate
- Alerts are not customizable
- Unpredictable pricing structure
- Designed for larger companies, not great for small to mid-sized organizations
- Few help documents
- Steep learning curve
- Compatibility issues with pre-existing infrastructure
50% of Anodot cloud cost management customers chose us to replace CloudHealth
Companies like yours are switching to Anodot because they’ve exhausted the return on investment they are able to receive from CloudHealth, and are in need of a next-generation approach to cloud cost management that delivers exponential value atop their cloud investments.
Deepest visibility and insights
Visualize and allocate 100% of your multicloud costs (with K8s insight down to the pod level) and deliver relevant, customized reporting for each persona in your FinOps organization.
Easy-to-action savings recommendations
Reduce waste and maximize utilization with more than twice as many savings recommendations as CloudHealth, highly-personalized to your business and infrastructure with CLI and console instructions for easy implementation.
Continuous cost monitoring and control
Adaptive, AI-powered forecasting, budgeting, and anomaly detection empower you to manage cloud spend with the highest degree of accuracy and relevance, so the right people are automatically alerted to take action when needed to keep your cloud investments on track.
Immediate value
Day one, you’ll know how much you can immediately save, will begin relying on pre-configured, customized reports and forecasts, and can start eliminating waste due to our comprehensive, pre-purchase proof of concept process.
Comparing CloudHealth
|
CloudHealth |
Anodot |
|
| Supported infrastructures | VMware, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, K8s | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, K8s |
| Virtual tagging and cost categorization | ✅ | ✅ |
| Cost allocation | Perspectives provide powerful cost categorization, but feature is laggy at scale and targeting is limited | Business mappings enable simple assignment of costs by any rule to any business object |
| Preconfigured, customizable reporting for each persona | ✅ | ✅ |
| Showback and chargeback | ✅ | ✅ |
| Kubernetes | Very limited K8s visibility and management capabilities; no savings recommendations | Deepest K8s visibility; savings recommendations are still in development |
| Savings recommendations | Very few, basic recommendations across primary services; automatable; savings projections are inaccurate and inflated; no way to mute irrelevant insights |
40+ easy-to-action recommendations across many services; configurable preferences; mute irrelevant recommendations; implementation instructions; accurate savings projections
|
| Rightsizing | ✅ | ✅ |
| Forecasting and budgeting | Inaccurate forecasts frustrate many customers | Adaptive, AI-driven forecasting provides highest degree of certainty at multiple levels of granularity |
| Anomaly detection and management | Configure email alerts based on basic detection of anomalous activity that deviates from historical trend; Does not differentiate between noise and impactful activity |
Fully-automated AI detects anomalies in near real-time and alerts the appropriate teams only when risk is meaningful, enabling quick response and resolution
|
| Extensibility | Multiple, fractured APIs leave much data inaccessible; supports Datadog and more as data sources | Single, robust, easy-to-use API; Data source integrations in development |
| Scalability | User interface lags at scale and some features have upper scale limitations | Unlimited scale to meet the enterprise demands |
| Ease of use | Frustrating, laggy interface, but visually-pleasing | Intuitive, responsive, and visually-pleasing interface |
| Pricing | Unpredictable, dynamic pricing taxes customers based on 3% of all cloud spend; provided at low cost by MSPs | Predictable, flat pricing based on large, capped tiers of cloud spend; provided at low cost by MSPs |
| Outlook | CloudHealth was acquired by VMware in 2018, precipitating a slowdown in product innovation. Broadcom acquisition of VMware puts the future of the CloudHealth product in doubt |
Anodot has recently doubled the size of the team supporting their FinOps product and publishes a public-facing roadmap that promises rapid innovation
|
CloudHealth’s new name
In September 2022, VMware announced that it was enclosing CloudHealth within its Aria suite, separate from the main VMware Aria Automation and VMware Aria Operations products as the standalone cloud cost tool. CloudHealth FinOps would also receive a new name, VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (CloudHealth).
CloudHealth’s popular cloud security capabilities are now part of VMware Aria Operations for Secure Clouds, while the FinOps capabilities remain separate.
This actually the second or third time VMware has attempted a renaming of CloudHealth since acquiring the tool in 2018.
CloudHealth’s future
CloudHealth customers are heading into uncertainty with the constant changes happening within the platform.
World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh expressed:
“We would love to build a strategic partnership with VMware. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s what they have planned.”
Exploring CloudHealth alternatives with Anodot
We boast seven key strengths that set us apart from the start:
Accurate Forecasting and Budgeting: Our data feedback helps fine-tune your model for top accuracy. The autonomous forecast is up 24/7, crunching real-time data streams to give ongoing forecasts for smarter budgeting and cost savings.
Cost Visibility and Control: We offer visibility for efficiently understanding multi-cloud and Kubernetes spending, helping you manage costs across all cloud accounts.
Savings Recommendations: Over 80 real-time recommendations to monitor and optimize cloud costs and resource usage across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Dive deep into your data to see how your infrastructure is and get immediate savings.
Real-time Anomaly Detection and Alerts: Our advanced algorithms identify irregular patterns and potential cost anomalies in real-time, alerting you to deviations from the norm.
Automatic Savings Tracker: With automated report saving and tracking capabilities, you can effortlessly track and evaluate the performance of your recommendations.
Multi-Tenant, Multi-Billing for MSPs and Enterprises: Consolidate and simplify billing operations for your customers on a unified platform.
CostGBT for AI-Powered Cloud Cost Insights: Enhances user experience with contextual insights, cost projections, and answers to complex cloud cost queries with a simple search.
Written by Perry Tapiero
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