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IBM Turbonomic pros and cons

Vendor: IBM
4.4 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1
4,347 followers
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Pros & Cons summary

IBM Turbonomic provides automated data center management and optimizes cloud operations, leading to significant cost savings, notably in Azure. It automates VM sizing across ESXi hosts, delivers notifications on cluster utilization, and integrates AI for intelligent automation. Reports and monitoring need improvement, with limited integration for customized apps. The licensing model can raise costs, and upgrades are complex, requiring new setups. Despite this, it remains a strong tool for resource management.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM Turbonomic provides hands-off management for equalizing data center usage, improving efficiency and saving human resources.
The tool offers automated right-sizing of VMs and vMotion across ESXi hosts, significantly reducing performance bottlenecks and enabling better resource utilization.
Proactive monitoring and optimization of cloud operations with 40% savings are attributed to proper VM sizing, avoiding unnecessary expenditure.
IBM Turbonomic enhances application performance optimization and streamlines IT processes, reducing manual intervention and saving substantial time.
IBM Turbonomic's AI and machine learning features, along with predictive capabilities, offer effective decision-making and automation, improving infrastructure efficiency.

CONS

IBM Turbonomic's reporting lacks detailed graphical output suitable for executive presentations.
There is no straightforward upgrade path between major versions, leading to data loss.
The tool can be overly aggressive in resource management, sometimes reallocating resources incorrectly.
Integration with other monitoring software like AppDynamics is limited, affecting application monitoring.
The automation features pose risks with certain systems, such as Windows Server, causing potential instability.
 

IBM Turbonomic Pros review quotes

RM
Dec 3, 2020
The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it.
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MK
Jun 18, 2024
The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to.
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DG
Nov 8, 2020
I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance.
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IBM Turbonomic
April 2025
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AH
Dec 29, 2020
In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs."
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reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 21, 2022
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.
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SB
Nov 11, 2021
Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us.
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CB
Dec 6, 2020
Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately.
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TW
Dec 2, 2020
It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get.
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Alex Darby - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 28, 2022
We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like.
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Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 6, 2022
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.
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IBM Turbonomic Cons review quotes

RM
Dec 3, 2020
The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time.
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MK
Jun 18, 2024
There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides.
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DG
Nov 8, 2020
It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic.
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Buyer's Guide
IBM Turbonomic
April 2025
Free Report: IBM Turbonomic Reviews and More
Learn what your peers think about IBM Turbonomic. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
DOWNLOAD NOW
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.
AH
Dec 29, 2020
It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines.
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reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 21, 2022
The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens.
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SB
Nov 11, 2021
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.
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CB
Dec 6, 2020
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.
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TW
Dec 2, 2020
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.
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Alex Darby - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 28, 2022
The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this.
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Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 6, 2022
The way it handles updates needs to be improved.
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Product Categories

Product Categories
AIOps
Cloud Migration
Cloud Management
Virtualization Management Tools
IT Financial Management
IT Operations Analytics
Cloud Analytics
Cloud Cost Management

Popular Comparisons

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