Harness Cloud Cost Management vs CloudHealth by VMware

Summary: 

CloudHealth by VMware provides a great set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for cloud providers, provided that you can dedicate the staff required to manage the complex reporting required. While they may have been one of the early innovators in cloud cost management, they’ve stagnated in new feature development since their acquisition by VMware (and are expected to stagnate further if the pending Broadcom acquisition is approved). The tool is difficult to implement, and engineering teams simply won’t use it.

If you are looking for a tool that your engineers will actually use, that gives deep insights into all your multi-cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure, and provides innovative, automated features that create new cloud cost savings opportunities, then Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness gives your FinOps teams the tools they need to accelerate cost savings, and maintain the most optimized cloud spend over time.

Cost Reporting:

Understanding cloud costs is the first fundamental for gaining control of your cloud spend. Without accurate and timely reporting, as well as continuous cost monitoring, your cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control.

For those with a PhD in analytics and reporting, CloudHealth by VMware is an amazing tool that provides a wealth of information on cloud costs. For the rest of their users, it is a very difficult tool to learn and understand, requiring extensive training to be able to create usable reports based on custom queries. This has led their customers to designate one or two people in finance to create and maintain weekly/monthly cost reports. Otherwise, no one else in the organization is using the tool, including the engineers tasked with chasing down cloud cost anomalies and implementing recommendations. “We just weren’t using it” is the most common reason customers are moving away from CloudHealth by VMware.

Harness CCM gives you easy to use, easy to understand reports and dashboards out of the box, with an intuitive interface that you can easily customize to suit the needs of your organization. FinOps, DevOps and Engineering teams can get real time visibility into cloud costs, budget status and cost anomaly alerts to keep them on top of their cloud spend. 

Cost Anomaly Monitoring:

Engineering is always innovating on new features that drive your business revenue, but what happens when they forget to turn off that expensive test cluster, and no one notices?  End of month bill shock, an unpleasant experience for everyone when your cloud bill is tens of thousands of dollars over budget. Continuous cost anomaly reporting is critical to preventing out of control cloud spend.

Harness CCM provides continuous cost anomaly monitoring, using AI to detect unexpected changes in your cloud spend. Not just big cost anomalies, either. Harness CCM surfaces smaller cost changes that overtime add up to much larger bills. When anomalies are detected, users are alerted immediately, with detailed information on where the anomaly is occurring so that root cause analysis can be performed.

For such a fundamental feature for keeping cloud costs under control, CloudHealth by VMware has not made releasing this a priority. Cost anomaly detection is in beta now, has been in beta for months, and is expected to still be in beta for months. This is simply unacceptable for any fiscally responsible organization to be forced to manually review periodic cost reports to surface cost anomalies, days or weeks after they’ve begun. 

Kubernetes Support:

The cloud-native computing world is built on Kubernetes, so having deep insights into your Kubernetes costs and how to optimize those costs is essential. CloudHealth by VMware does have basic cost reporting for Kubernetes workloads, but they do not provide analysis to help customers break out their utilized, idle, and unallocated costs within Kubernetes clusters. Nor do they provide recommendations for right-sizing Kubernetes resources in any way, leaving customers stranded when it comes to optimizing their Kubernetes infrastructure.

Harness CCM provides detailed cost analysis for Kubernetes clusters, at a very granular level that can be tailored for your business. Our Kubernetes cost recommendations can help you right-size your node pools as well as the underlying infrastructure, making your clusters as efficient as possible. We also deliver automated cluster cost management features such as Cluster Orchestrator for EKS that can save our customers up to 90% on cloud costs. 

Automated Cloud Cost Optimization:

‍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 more, that saves our customers up to 90% on cloud costs. CloudHealth has fallen behind the competition for automated cost savings. While they do have rudimentary policies for purchasing commitments, it falls short of many customers needs. Other than that, CloudHealth by VMware has no automated cost savings features available for their customers.