Cloud Management Tools: Key Features and 10 Notable Solutions

What Are Cloud Management Tools?

 

Cloud management tools are software platforms that help organizations manage and optimize their cloud services. They provide functionalities for monitoring, managing, and optimizing cloud resources. 

These tools enable users to oversee cloud infrastructure, environments, applications, and services, ensuring operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Cloud management tools generally support multi-cloud environments, private clouds, and hybrid clouds.

Key features of cloud management solutions include resource provisioning, cost management, performance monitoring, automation, and security management. They aim to offer a view of all cloud assets, ensuring that resources are used optimally and potential issues are detected and resolved promptly. 

In this article:

• The Benefits of Cloud Management Tools
• Key Features of Cloud Management Tools
• Notable Cloud Management Platforms and Tools

The Benefits of Cloud Management Tools

 

Benefits for Organizations

 

Cloud management tools allow organizations to automate routine cloud operations, such as provisioning and scaling. This reduces the manual effort and potential errors associated with managing cloud environments, leading to more consistent performance and reliability of cloud services.

They also offer centralized control over security policies, helping organizations enforce consistent security measures across their cloud environments. This reduces the risk of security breaches and ensures compliance with industry regulations.

These tools help organizations minimize cloud expenses by offering detailed cost analytics and automated recommendations. This is particularly useful in dynamic environments where resource usage can change, making manual cost tracking and optimization challenging.

Benefits for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

 

Some cloud management tools allow MSPs to manage multiple client environments from a single platform, providing visibility and control across various cloud infrastructures. Multi-tenant support simplifies the management of diverse client needs and enhances service delivery.

Cloud management tools also enable MSPs to automate repetitive tasks such as monitoring, patching, and backup management, freeing resources to focus on higher-value activities. This improves operational efficiency and allows MSPs to offer more competitive pricing.

These tools can help improve reporting and transparency. MSPs can provide clients with detailed reports on resource usage, performance, and costs, building trust and facilitating better client relationships. 

Key Features of Cloud Management Tools

 

Cloud management tools typically include the following capabilities: 

• Resource provisioning and management: Allow organizations to automate the deployment and configuration of cloud resources. Organizations can use templates and predefined policies to ensure that resources are provisioned consistently. Real-time insights and alerts allow administrators to make proactive adjustments.
• Cost management and optimization: Offer detailed cost analytics, budget tracking, and spending forecasts. By identifying cost drivers and inefficiencies, these tools help organizations optimize their cloud spending. In addition, many tools provide automated recommendations for cost savings, such as rightsizing instances or switching to reserved instances.
• Performance monitoring and management: Offer dashboards and metrics to track the performance of applications and infrastructure. These tools enable administrators to detect performance bottlenecks and resolve issues before they impact end-users. By analyzing historical data, they can forecast potential performance issues.
• Automation and orchestration: Enable the automation of repetitive tasks such as deployment, scaling, and patching. Orchestration features ensure that these tasks are executed in the correct sequence and without manual intervention. By automating routine operations, organizations can reduce operational costs and improve efficiency.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Automate the backup process, ensuring critical data is regularly copied and stored securely. In a failure, automated recovery procedures can restore data quickly. Disaster recovery planning is also supported, enabling organizations to define recovery objectives and strategies.
• AI-driven analysis and optimization: Analyze cloud spending patterns in real time, identifying cost anomalies such as unexpected spikes or underutilized resources. AI-driven tools can automatically suggest or implement discount strategies like switching to reserved instances, rightsizing resources, or adjusting savings plans.

Notable Cloud Management Platforms and Tools

 

1. Anodot

 

Anodot is a cloud management platform designed to tackle cloud cost management challenges. It leverages advanced AI and machine learning technologies to give businesses the insights and tools necessary to optimize their multi-cloud, SaaS, and Kubernetes expenditures. FinOps teams use it to enhance cost visibility, discover actionable savings opportunities, and confidently forecast and budget their cloud resources.

• Billing rules: User-friendly interface simplifies billing rules management without requiring technical solutions or API mastery.

• Credit management: Automate the management of multiple transitions, client invoices, and allocations to reduce manual workload.

• Invoicing and reporting: Obtain thorough, granular billing insights to help clients track costs.

• Forecasting and data visualization: Observe cost expenditures using graphs or tables with color-coded metrics to display budget activity patterns.

• Cost visibility and control: Group by categories, inspired by AWS for easier comparisons, with automated tag display from CUR—no custom building needed.

• Savings recommendations: Instant guidance to right-size your infrastructure and eliminate cloud waste with 80+ recommendations. Analyze and optimize your commitments while reducing cloud waste.

• Real-time anomaly detection and alerts: Detect anomalies in dynamic cloud environments with advanced ML algorithms to establish normal behavior baselines and automatically provide root cause analysis.

• Automated monitoring system: Users don’t need to learn complex ML techniques, as the dashboard automatically establishes metrics to oversee, including an automatic savings tracker for cumulative savings from recommendations.

• AI FinOps chatbot: CostGPT is an AI assistant that helps manage cloud expenses through simple searches and queries on unblended, amortized, and net costs, as well as service usage and forecasts, available as table results or real-time data visualizations.
  

Learn more about Anodot

2. Flexera CMP

 

Flexera’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) is a tool that provides capabilities for organizations managing multi-cloud environments. It supports cloud resource discovery, provisioning, orchestration, and automation, along with operational monitoring and governance. The platform can handle public and private clouds and virtual and bare-metal servers.

 

Key features of Flexera’s Cloud Management Platform:

• Unified view of cloud resources: Offers visibility of public and private cloud resources, including compute, network, and storage, through a single pane of glass.
• Orchestration engine: Helps manage cloud resources and automates actions across multiple cloud servers and services. This feature aims to simplify operations and reduce manual intervention.
• Multi-cloud templates: Offers reusable blueprints to orchestrate infrastructure and services across clouds. This standardization is to ensure consistency in cloud deployments.
• Automated governance: Supports out-of-the-box and custom policies to automate the governance of costs, operations, security, and compliance. This is to ensure that cloud activities are controlled and aligned with organizational policies.

3. Nutanix Cloud Manager

 

Nutanix Cloud Manager aims to simplify building and managing cloud deployments, delivering faster time to value for customers. It provides a solution for intelligent operations, self-service and orchestration, security compliance and visibility, and cost control, making it an appropriate choice for managing multi-cloud environments.

 

Key features of Nutanix Cloud Manager:

• Intelligent operations: Helps optimize capacity, detect performance anomalies, and automate operational tasks. Ensures efficient resource usage and maintains performance by automatically raising anomaly alerts without requiring configuration.
• Self-service provisioning: Simplifies the management, deployment, and scaling of applications with self-service capabilities and centralized role-based IT governance. Users can create and publish blueprints through the Nutanix Marketplace
• Cost and security governance: Enables financial accountability and unifies security operations with intelligent analysis and regulatory compliance. Offers automated cost control actions, chargeback policies, and budget alerts.
• Codeless task automation: Automates routine operational tasks, enabling IT teams to build automation workflows and improve productivity without the need for coding, enhancing operational efficiency.

4. nOps

 

nOps helps organizations manage and optimize their AWS usage and costs automatically. By providing visibility into AWS expenditures and automating cost optimization tasks, nOps provides operational efficiencies for DevOps and engineering teams.

 

Key features of nOps:

• Compute copilot: Helps maximize EKS and ASG scalability and discounts by automatically optimizing the environment for spot instances, reserved instances, and savings plans.
• Commitment manager: Helps maximize compute savings commitments with savings plans while mitigating the risks associated with long-term commitments, ensuring financial efficiency.
• Cloud optimization essentials: Uses AI to automate time-consuming cost optimization tasks. The AI constantly learns usage patterns, identifies idle resources, and turns them off automatically.

5. CloudHealth by VMware

 

CloudHealth by VMware, or Tanzu CloudHealth, is a tool that simplifies financial management and supports organizational collaboration across multi-cloud environments. It focuses on continuous optimization of cloud costs and cloud management practices.

 

Key features of CloudHealth by VMware:

• Cost optimization: Helps improve resource utilization and realize cost savings with tailored recommendations. Offers governance policies and automated actions that execute changes in the cloud environment.
• Cloud management practice: Provides a framework for progressing through the cloud management maturity journey.
• Resource and organization management: Aligns cloud data to the organization for greater control over user access. Dynamically allocates assets to business groups, ensuring accountability for cost and usage across the organization.

6. IBM Apptio Cloudability

 

IBM Apptio Cloudability is a cloud financial management tool for optimizing IT spend, improving operations, and driving greater financial returns. By ingesting, normalizing, and structuring billing data across all major cloud providers, Cloudability provides unified cost visibility and aims to enable financial accountability in the cloud.

 

Key features of IBM Apptio Cloudability:

• Cloud cost allocation: Allocate cloud costs accurately and enable team ownership by assigning expenses to specific departments or projects. This ensures that all cloud spend is tracked and accounted for, reducing waste and ensuring accountability.
• Automated data ingestion: Automatically ingests data from over 350 sources with intelligent connectors. Scheduled connectors can pull data regularly and receive alerts and notifications when uploads are complete.
• Technology business management (TBM) unified model: Integrates cost data from corporate finance with IT and business products and services. This helps organizations understand the value of their spending on technology.

7. Morpheus Data

 

Morpheus Data is a platform that aims to improve speed and agility in application modernization, bridging the gap between hybrid cloud environments and organizational silos. Morpheus caters to developers, IT operators, security professionals, and finance users by providing persona-based functionalities.

 

Key features of Morpheus Data:

• Self-service provisioning: Offers self-service provisioning through a customizable GUI, full API and CLI, CI/CD pipeline integration, Terraform Provider, and ITSM like ServiceNow. This ensures users have various access points to deploy resources efficiently.
• Flexible catalog builder: Allows users to create a catalog that includes basic VM/OS, PaaS application instances, or multi-tier and multi-platform app stacks. This flexibility allows for easy customization and deployment of applications.
• Workflow and job engine: Simplifies day-2 operations with a workflow and job engine. Combines different task types, passes variables, and uses secure keys to simplify operational tasks and maintenance.
• Kubernetes integration: Offers a built-in CNCF-certified Morpheus Kubernetes Service, which integrates with external Kubernetes options like EKS, AKS, and GKE. 

8. CloudCheckr

 

CloudCheckr, part of Spot by NetApp helps manage and reduce cloud costs, optimize resources, gain operational efficiencies, improve governance, and strengthen security and compliance.

 

 

Key features of CloudCheckr:

• Actionable visibility: Offers visibility into current and historical cloud spend, providing insights into what cloud services and resources are in use, by whom, and how they are driving costs and consumption.
• Cloud cost optimization: Continuously optimizes cloud spend by identifying right-size opportunities and rebalancing instances. CloudCheckr’s purchase recommendations for commitment discounts help organizations reduce cloud costs.
• Resource efficiency and waste reduction: Tracks long-term resource consumption trends to improve utilization and eliminate waste. Quickly detects, investigates, and responds to cost overruns.
• Accurate chargeback/showback: Helps manage and ensure accountability by precisely allocating cloud consumption to the right cost center, business unit, product line, project, team, or other entity. 

9. Apache CloudStack

 

Apache CloudStack is an open-source software system used to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines. It provides a highly available, scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. It is widely used by service providers for public cloud services and companies for on-premises private clouds and hybrid cloud solutions.

 

Key features of Apache CloudStack:

• IaaS solution: Offers a stack of features for IaaS cloud computing, including compute orchestration, network-as-a-service, user and account management, an open native API, resource accounting, and a user interface.
• Multi-cloud management: Supports various hypervisors such as VMware, XenServer, KVM, and XCP-ng, along with bare metal, providing flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.
• User-friendly management tools: Offers a web interface, command line tools, and a full-featured RESTful API. Additionally, CloudStack’s API is compatible with AWS EC2 and S3, enabling hybrid cloud deployments.
• Kubernetes integration: Helps simplify cluster management with Kubernetes ClusterAPI (CAPC) and Kubernetes CKS for quick start integration, making it easy to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters within CloudStack.

 

10. Oracle Enterprise Manager

 

Oracle Enterprise Manager is a platform for monitoring, managing, and optimizing IT infrastructure, databases, middleware, and applications. It helps organizations simplify operations, reduce costs, and enhance performance across on-premises and cloud environments.

 

Key features of Oracle Enterprise Manager:

• Database performance management: Helps monitor and manage Oracle Database estates with integrated and automated analytics. To identify and resolve performance issues, offers tools like Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) and SQL Tuning Advisor. Validates fixes with real-world testing through Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA).
• Database operations automation: Automates database operations at scale, including provisioning, patching, and upgrades. Enforces standardization and compliance, simplifying fleet maintenance.
• Exadata management: Helps monitor and manage all Exadata components in a single view. Offers automated alerts, capacity planning, and migration tools to optimize resource utilization.
• Enterprise monitoring: Offers visibility into the IT stack with enterprise-class monitoring for databases, middleware, and applications. Supports customized alerts and notifications, with always-on monitoring for critical alert notification during maintenance.

 

Learn more in our detailed guide to cloud management platforms 

Conclusion

 

Cloud management tools enable organizations to manage and optimize their cloud environments effectively. By providing comprehensive automation, cost management, performance monitoring, and security features, these tools help organizations simplify operations, reduce expenses, and ensure that cloud resources are used efficiently. As cloud environments continue to become more complex, leveraging the right cloud management tool is essential for maintaining control and enhancing productivity in the cloud.