Harness

Cloud Cost Management

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CloudHealth by VMware

Harness Cloud Cost Management vs CloudHealth by VMware

Cloud Cost Management

Harness Cloud Cost Management simplifies and automates the features FinOps, CloudOps, and Engineering teams need to take control of cloud spend.
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CloudHealth by VMware

CloudHealth by VMware delivers intelligent insights that help you optimize costs, improve governance, and strengthen your cloud security posture.

Company size
Company size

37,000

Founded
Founded

2012

Funding
Funding

Acquired by VMware (2018)
CloudHealth was acquired by VMware in 2018. VMware is currently under acquisition by chip maker Broadcom. “CloudHealth by VMware” is being rebranded as “VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth”

Acquired

CloudHealth is categorized as:
Cloud Cost Management

What is the difference between Harness Cloud Cost Management vs. CloudHealth by VMware?

CloudHealth by VMware was built for business intelligence, but it is complex, and lacks the deep Kubernetes support or any of the advanced automated cloud cost savings features found in Harness Cloud Cost Management.

CloudHealth by VMware vs Harness: DevOps Tools Comparison

Updated

November 30, 2023

  • SaaS
  • Audience & Primary Users
  • Finance
  • Cloud Support
  • Time Granularity
  • Tag Management Required
  • Hybrid Cloud Visibility
  • Cloud Account Visibility
  • Cloud Region Visibility
  • Application Visibility
  • Microservice Visibility
  • Environment Visibility
  • Non-Cluster Visibility (Services)
  • Cluster Visibility (Kubernetes/ECS)
  • Root Cost Analysis (3 Metrics)
  • Cloud Event Correlation (e.g. deploy)
  • Cost Recommendations
  • Alerting & Budgets
  • Anomaly Detection
  • Reporting
  • Documentation
  • Training
  • Support
  • Automated Idle Resource Management
  • Cloud Cost Business Intelligence

<yes><yes>

Engineering & Finance

All

Hourly

<yes><yes> Optional

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Utilized, Idle, Unallocated

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Finance

All

Daily

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<with><with> Requires Tagging

<with><with> Requires Tagging

<no><no> Requires Tagging

<with><with> Requires Tagging

<with><with> Requires Tagging

<no><no> No Idle/Unallocated Cost Visibility

<no><no>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

<no><no>

Features
Harness CCM
Harness CCM
CloudHealth by VMware
Solution
Deployment Option

SaaS and Self-Hosted

SaaS

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Multi-Cloud Support

AWS, Azure and GCP

AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
On-Prem Cost Monitoring

<with><with>
Kubernetes Only

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Pricing Model

Percentage Cloud Spend

Percentage Cloud Spend

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Cost Visibility
Cost Perspectives / Chargeback / Showback

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Cost Categories / Dynamic Bucketing

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Kubernetes Cost Allocation (By Node/Cluster/Workload)

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Multi-Cloud Cost Visualizations

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Import 3rd Party Costs

Coming Soon

<no><no>

Out-of-the-Box Dashboards

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Custom BI Dashboards

<yes><yes>

<with><with>

Forecasting

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Cloud Inventory

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Cost Optimization
Anomaly Detection

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Automated Idle Resource Management

<yes><yes>

<with><with> Manual Schedule

Spot Orchestration

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

Cluster Orchestration on Spot Instances

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

Kubernetes Node-Pool Recommendations

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

Kubernetes Workload Recommendations

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

AWS Compute Recommendations

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Azure Compute Recommendations

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

GCP Compute Recommendations

<no><no>

<yes><yes>

RI / SP Planning and Recommendations

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Automated RI / SP Contract Execution

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Cost Governance
Out-of-the-Box Governance Policy Rules

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Automated Governance Rule Enforcement

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

AI Assisted Governance Rule Creation

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

Budgets

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Alerts

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Reporting

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Administrative
Multi-Currency Support

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

MSP Margin Adjustments

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Role-based Access Control

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Full Audit Trails

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

APIs Available

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

24/7 Support Available

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Training

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Documentation

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

No items found.
No items found.
No items found.

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.

Cloud Cost Management

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Cloud Cost Management