VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth Reviews

I use the solution daily, multiple hours a day to identify possible savings by analyzing the various displays as well as the policies for possible cost savings for our customers.

CloudHelth has helped our organization with trying to right-size virtual machines based on current utilization and making recommendations for DM proper sizing and possible reservation purchases.

Our primary use case is for chargeback of cloud cost.

The most valuable thing I have found is the cost saving recommendations.

I am using CloudHealth for my data and different operational activities. The solution creates reports for different projects. It provides understanding and transparency into the cloud costs. I get the costs at 4,000 aggregate and at the resource ID level. CloudHealth also provides analysis of the transfer service per account.

The solution is useful for cloud transparency and visibility in reports and dashboards that I have generated, especially the pre-populated dashboards.

Primarily, the end-user gets a perspective of their cloud usage and up-to-date billing. That's one use case. 

On top of that, there are multiple reports which I use daily, to track usage or to lay out performance optimization and cost optimization.

The cost and performance optimization reports are the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution can scale.

We find the product to be stable. 

The pricing is rather competitive right now.

Technical support is very good. 

The solution is very good as an infrastructure as a service.

The product offers very good visibility.

The solution is good for cloud cost management.

CloudHealth needs to start building out Turbonomic-types of features that help the customers who are using CloudHealth really understand everything down to the server level, the virtual machine level. They need to be able to illustrate the performance of the machine. As a customer, I want to be able to log into one tool and be able to look all the way down to a virtual machine that's running in Azure or AWS and see, is it running at 80% utilization or 20%? If it's only running 20% utilization, well, maybe I should move that workload off of that machine and combine it with another machine and remove that machine, therefore lowering my overall Azure spend as I've just eliminated a server. However, I need that insight in order to make that call. 

Oftentimes, when you look at multiple application layers, if you can identify six or eight or ten different servers that are just underutilized and can eliminate them from your fleet, well, you just dropped your Azure bill by a thousand dollars a week. The savings they could offer clients could be quite substantial. However, CloudHealth doesn't have that capability. They can't reach down to that level right now. That's why you've got to bring in Turbonomic. They can reach in at that virtual machine level to tell me if the machine is being truly utilized. I'd be able to understand if I should go ahead and eliminate it from my fleet.

If I took the remediation recommendations from Turbonomic, and I implemented that into my Azure environment, and then came back and analyzed it from CloudHealth, well, now I could see that that overall Azure spend has dropped by 10%. However, ideally, CloudHealth should have those tools built-in just to help me optimize my fleet on the fly. And then I should see that cost justification.

CloudHealth could expand into is the SaaS side of it. Right now, CloudHealth is primarily focused on the infrastructure as a service players and is helping to analyze, how the infrastructure as a service virtual environment maps to the customers, to the needs. The opportunity that CloudHealth has is if you're talking to somebody about their public cloud spend, oftentimes the customer thinks of that as not just the infrastructure as a service, but they also look at that from a software as a service. One of the biggest challenges that we also see in the enterprise accounts that we work with is the SaaS sprawl is almost out of control. It's as bad as the infrastructure as a service sprawl, where people are given the credentials to their Azure tenant, and now they're spitting out virtual machines for all kinds of stuff.

Unless you really have better visibility and control in that, you just don't know what's going on until you get the bill. The same problem is happening in the SaaS side where, if you have 500 employees, traditionally that company goes out and buys Office 365 times 500, and they just give everybody the same thing. At the end of the day, maybe everybody doesn't need an Office 365 E5 plan. Maybe a third of the company needs E5, a third could get by with E3 and a third could get by with E1. If you optimize that Office 365 footprint, along with all of the other SaaS applications that you may be attaching to that Office 365, like Trend Micro for security, or Metallic for backup, there is more money to be saved.

Right now, CloudHealth doesn't give me any visibility into that SaaS side of the model. They give me a view into the infrastructure as a service side and the cost analytics and reporting. If I could use that one toolset that not only helps me optimize my infrastructure as a service and also have visibility across my SaaS environment, to me that would be the ideal situation. That way, I've got one platform, one toolset that helps me manage my cloud spend across SaaS and IaaS. Right now, for the tools that are out there, it's either IaaS or SaaS. And there's not a lot of players in the SaaS management space at this point, there are only four or five companies that I'm aware of.

We primarily use the solution for some kind of customer management, to monitor health conditions in a GCP. We also provide the A-Labs Asia GCP services to our enterprise client.

We are able to create an internal price of the product that we can then sell to clients. We get the cost plan at a good discount and then resell it with a mark up to our enterprise-level clients. This flexibility in pricing is one of the solution's best features.

The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds.

There could be flexibility in pricing for the product. They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size. It will help us get the right cost. Additionally, there could be integration with different cloud providers so developers can utilize diverse servers.

The use case is to produce a cost report for us so that we can optimize costs.

This solution is deployed on a public cloud.

The Perspectives feature could be better. I would like to have more automation and flexibility to put in data and react to a certain event. Right now, it's very rigid if you design a report in a certain way, and there are cross-restrictions.

I'd like some API, but we have found that there are still limitations.