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AWS Cost Management [EOL] vs Cloudability comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
AWS Cost Management [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudability
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
RANJAN KUMAR - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to set cost thresholds and receive alerts if the actual cost exceeds them
We regularly check the status of services to identify any unnecessary or unexpected costs. We utilize the billing dashboard in AWS to monitor daily costs and assess any significant increases. For instance, if our daily AWS expenses usually amount to $1,000 for running a hundred instances, and suddenly it spikes to $1,500, we investigate the reasons behind the increase. We scrutinize detailed reports, identify the areas and services contributing to the rise, and inform our manager. The dashboard overview in AWS Cost Explorer provides a high-level summary of our expenses, covering databases. This includes total costs, daily costs, and a breakdown by services. AWS Cost Explorer offers visualization tools like line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. These visualizations assist us in quickly understanding expenditures, enabling us to pinpoint areas that might need attention. The tool allows the creation of custom reports by selecting and configuring filtering and grouping options. Custom reports include a data range selector, making it easy to analyze expenses for specific periods such as daily, monthly, or custom durations. The budget feature is client-dependent. Before creating any services, we engage with our client to understand their requirements, such as the number of instances, CPU, and memory needed. Subsequently, we create a budgeting tool in servers based on these specifications. Our team configures custom notifications to alert us when actual costs or usage exceed predefined thresholds. These alerts can be sent via email or integrated with Simple Notification Service. I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.
Vijay More - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to understand and manage spending across clouds, but has dashboard limitations
Cloudability offers valuable insights into data engineering and analytics platforms. With access to the same data Cloudability utilizes, one could recreate similar dashboards on their own data platform. This implies that Cloudability's role could be replaceable with some organizational effort, provided they have the necessary data sources and expertise. However, for organizations looking to streamline processes without investing extensive time, money, and resources into building their solution, Cloudability serves as a convenient option. Moreover, it offers benefits for both single-cloud and multi-cloud users. While it's beneficial for single-cloud users, it becomes particularly advantageous for organizations with multi-cloud environments, as it helps manage costs and optimize resources across different cloud providers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."
"The budgeting tool of AWS Cost Management is the most valuable feature."
"The initial setup wasn't complex at all."
"The stability and scalability are good."
"All of the reporting features are very good, as they allow us to track monthly expenses and send relevant emails."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It's not complex at all."
"I like the recommendation we get from AWS Cost Management to use a particular image or VM type."
"AWS Cost Management is good for providing in-depth information in one place."
"The tool's cost management feature provides a comprehensive view of AWS costs, allowing us to plan and make cost-effective decisions. With AWS Cost Explorer, we can perform cost planning, generate recommendations, and provide clients with suggestions for resizing. This feature includes data filtering and protection, offering users insights into spending patterns through AWS spending patterns and planning tools. The product is easy to learn."
"The tool helps us to resize on AWS correctly."
"The support from IBM is fantastic"
"Each user can have their own dashboard that they want to consume. Instead of having to share one dashboard for multiple users, you can create individual views for each user to view, and that view will contain only their own accounts, which allows for separation of data."
"The pricing isn't too expensive."
"The sizing recommendation will look, and say, "You are only using this at 80%," then recommend a better fit for you."
"One of the standout features of the solution is its groups and views functionality. The solution is highly-stable. The solution is highly-scalable. The customer support is good. They can be easily contacted. The initial setup is straightforward. It's an excellent tool, especially when dealing with multiple clouds. It streamlines the process, eliminating the need to check each cloud individually."
"It has already given us insight into how to optimize. So, we are now ramping up steadily its usage."
"The most crucial feature in reducing my cloud costs has been the rightsizing recommendations, along with the dashboards that track reserved instance spending coverage and utilization. As for Cloudability's integration with our existing cloud infrastructure, it's not integrated directly into our AWS infrastructure but rather reads and pulls data from it, providing valuable insights and analysis for cost management."
 

Cons

"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"The solution needs to have its own dashboard for seeing details on it. It should be customizable as well so I have the ability to pull up the information I need to see and have it in one place for my reference. I should just be able to click and see everything I need in one step."
"I would like to see the forecasting models improved with AWS Cost Management."
"We need finer-grained control over the roles and policies for users, specifying their permissions as to what they can look at."
"The solution needs to improve the communication mechanism available to the stakeholders."
"This program is not very scalable."
"There could be an option to build custom dashboards for the platform."
"Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or downloading data."
"I would like to see AWS Cost Management be more precise in their calculations."
"There are also some limitations with the dashboards and data representation in Cloudability."
"In general, I feel Cloudability wasn't able to support many resources."
"Right now, what we're doing is we are manually putting the data in it, which is something which we don't like about Cloudability."
"Cloudability needs to focus on more cloud providers."
"We would like them to have a linear regression, so we can be predictive for budgets, allocations, and the year's follow ups. We also want to have a longer window of analytics with better certainty that our workload will fit the model, not just in a two week window."
"The API is not well-documented. It is not straightforward and difficult to use. This needs to be improved, as it is very difficult for our developers to develop automation around it."
"We have dealt with a few technical support people where we ask for one thing and they might not deliver straightaway. It seems like they are a stretched across multiple customers."
"Cloudability needs to improve on data collection from cloud sources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"We have signed a long-term contract with AWS. There are different service levels that will determine the level of support you have."
"The product is affordable."
"We get AWS Cost Management for free because we use AWS services."
"AWS Cost Management is free to use."
"The tool's pricing depends on our services."
"It justifies the cost and is worth it."
"My team is one of the most expensive teams, and we look at it quite a bit. We have probably easily saved around $400,000 USD a year."
"The price of the license or the usage is a percentage of the top consumption. So it varies from year to year."
"We have seen ROI with the reserved instances, and having the ability to predict what reserved instances you can get. We can save tens of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases."
"Cloudability is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Media Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about AWS Cost Management?
The tool's cost management feature provides a comprehensive view of AWS costs, allowing us to plan and make cost-effe...
What needs improvement with AWS Cost Management?
Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or d...
What do you like most about Cloudability?
The most crucial feature in reducing my cloud costs has been the rightsizing recommendations, along with the dashboar...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudability?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive. Pricing is one of th...
What needs improvement with Cloudability?
The first one is, how to help users, especially practitioners, stick to their commitment plan. For example, how can I...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Amazon Cost Management
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
Adobe, Uber, Pega, imgur, Pixable, Blackboard, Keboola, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Microsoft, Apptio and others in Cloud Cost Management. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.