Harness Cloud Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Summary: 

If you’re a large organization with a data center on-premises or are in a hybrid cloud environment, IBM Turbonomic seems like a good solution. It’s not a cloud cost management tool in and of itself though, describing itself as an application resource management (ARM) tool. While it does have some interesting AI-powered features like Actions that can automatically reallocate resources, its main function is resource efficiency optimization, not cloud cost management. It falls short on cloud cost management functionality, lacking fundamental features such as budgeting/forecasting, cost anomaly detection, and even basic cloud cost reporting and billing.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, automated cloud cost savings, and cost forecasting, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness understands the pressure on engineering and FinOps teams to optimize cloud efficiency, along with the requirement to paint a full picture of cloud costs that includes container costs. Harness is a powerful, easy to implement solution that gets customers more value out of the cloud.

Tag Management Required:

‍Tag management is essential to understanding your infrastructure costs, and having a strong tagging policy is the foundation for cloud asset management. With Harness CCM, there’s no need for  manual tagging of cloud resources to maintain excellent tag cleanliness. The Harness Platform automates the creation of cloud infrastructure throughout the CD development pipeline and can automatically provision resources and tag them at creation time.

Unfortunately, manual tagging and great tag health is a requirement to get the full value out of Turbonomic’s resource management capabilities. The tool relies heavily on customers creating, applying, and maintaining good tagging policies to get granular control over resources and workflows. 

Cost Anomaly Detection:

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. Turbonomic does not provide any insights into unexpected cost spikes.

Resource Management:

One of the core benefits of using cloud cost management tools is the recommendations for optimizing the efficiency of cloud infrastructure resources. The challenge that all companies face is making sure that the right engineers are reviewing those recommendations and taking action. Harness goes beyond cost recommendations to actively manage cloud resource idle time effectively with Cloud Autostopping, without custom scripts or manual engineering effort. So  engineers are free to focus on what matters most: revenue generating application development.

While Turbonomic does have some nice automation to push recommendation reviews into Jira or ServiceNow and take action on approved recommendations, it doesn’t solve the problem that  engineers must review those tickets, taking engineering time away from development. There is no support for managing idle resources, whether via schedule or otherwise.