A detailed comparison of Google Cost Management and Harness tools

Cloud Cost Management

Harness

Google Cost Management

Solution

Deployment Option

SaaS and Self-Hosted

SaaS

Multi-Cloud Support

AWS, Azure, and GCP

GCP Only

On-Prem Cost Monitoring

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Kubernetes Only

Pricing Model

Percentage Cloud Spend

Free

Cost Visibility

Cost Perspectives / Chargeback / Showback

Cost Categories / Dynamic Bucketing

Kubernetes Cost Allocation (By Node/Cluster/Workload)

Multi-Cloud Cost Visualizations

Import 3rd Party Costs

Coming soon

Out-of-the-Box Dashboards

Custom BI Dashboards

Forecasting

Cloud Inventory

Cost Optimization

Anomaly Detection

Automated Idle Resource Management

Spot Orchestration

Cluster Orchestration on Spot Instances

Kubernetes Node-Pool Recommendations

Kubernetes Workload Recommendations

AWS Compute Recommendations

Azure Compute Recommendations

GCP Compute Recommendations

RI / SP Planning and Recommendations

Automated RI / SP Contract Execution

Governance

Out-of-the-Box Governance Policy Rules

Automated Governance Rule Enforcement

AI Assisted Governance Rule Creation

Budgets

Alerts

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Reporting

Administrative

Multi-Currency Support

MSP Margin Adjustments

Role-based Access Control

Full Audit Trails

APIs Available

24/7 Support Available

Training

Documentation

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Detailed feature comparison

Summary

Google Cost Management is a suite of products including Google Cloud Billing, Recommenders, and the newly released FinOps Hub (Sept 2023) that together provide a good set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for GCP. As a free tool available to GCP customers, it provides the basics that finance teams and budget owners want to know. However, they fall short in providing support for multi-cloud setups and container orchestration outside of GKE, which is where the world is headed. To fully leverage the capabilities of Google Cloud Billing and get a deep understanding of costs, there’s an inordinate amount of tagging required, and customers find themselves lacking support for day-to-day operations, as with services such as anomaly detection. Google Cloud Billing is built for point-in-time views into costs, not for the daily toil that goes into efficient cloud cost management.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, automated cost savings, and cloud governance, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness delivers automated cost savings features such as Cloud AutoStopping and Commitment Orchestration, creating cost savings opportunities that don’t exist with manual efforts. Our Cloud Asset Governance gives our customers the ability to proactively control and govern cloud costs over time, allowing our customers to get more from their cloud.

Multi-cloud Cost Visibility

With over 60% of organizations having some or all of their workloads spread across multiple cloud providers, it’s critical that cloud cost management tools have the ability to track and report on all multi-cloud costs for an organization. As expected, Google Cost Management tools only support GCP infrastructure.

Harness provides granular cost visibility for AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as Kubernetes deployments on these cloud providers as well as on-premises, all delivered in easy-to-consume reports and dashboards customized to your users’ business needs.

Automated Cost Savings:

Getting engineers to take action on cloud cost recommendations shouldn’t be your only path to cloud cost savings. Automation can unlock cost savings opportunities that simply can’t be realized with manual or scripted efforts. Harness CCM has a multitude of automation tools that save our customers money, from idle cloud resource management (Cloud Autostopping) to spot instance orchestration, and Commitment Orchestration, which save our customers up to 90% on cloud costs when used together

The only savings automation that Google (in general, not in Google Cloud Billing) provides is an option to auto-renew Committed Use Discounts (CUDs). There is no intelligence built-in to understand what *should* be renewed, and once a CUD is renewed, it can not be canceled. Customers could be stuck with contracts that no longer meet their needs, leading to cloud cost waste.

Cost Anomaly Monitoring

Harness allows customers to automatically flag and drill down to any anomalous cost spikes, avoiding end-of-month surprises. Leveraging machine learning that customizes itself to a customer’s environment, including customizations for seasonality, customers can proactively detect and resolve cost spikes. Google Cloud Billing does not provide any insights into unexpected cost spikes.

Harness CCM vs Google Cost Management