VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth Reviews

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 became a reseller about a year or so ago. We've been dealing with it for a while.

We've actually had to engage with technical support a few different times. Whether it's just configuring customer accounts correctly or troubleshooting, it's always been very good. There was a little bit of a hiccup during the transition when VMware was acquiring CloudHealth where I think there were just some of the procedural and operational processes where we had some account managers change. 

When we reached out to the technical account manager that we were assigned at the time, he had been shuffled around a bit. We were routed from one person to another and had to keep getting people up to speed. However, that got ironed out. 

The ones that I have been personally using are CloudHealth and CloudCheckr, however, those are more around the cloud cost analytics, the cloud cost management. Those companies are starting to, change a bit. You've got Turbonomic and companies like that, that are coming from the on-prem asset level up, where you would use Turbonomics to crawl internal VMware infrastructure types of environments and tag specific applications. Let's say that I'm trying to think of how I'm going to migrate my marketing application from my on-prem environment to the cloud. That marketing application is built at three tiers. You've got a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. That's multiple servers, multiple layers of applications. How do you analyze what that footprint looks like so I can make a fair approach to what I'm going to need in an Azure or an AWS cloud environment to move that application?

Turbonomic has approached it from that perspective where they come in and they ask questions such as how many IOPS is that application consuming? What's the performance of the servers at a CPU and storage and a memory level, so that they can actually map that into equivalent Amazon EC2 servers or Azure servers of sizes of X, Y, or Z.

That's where Turbonomic has really approached it from that kind of foundational infrastructure up whereas a CloudHealth or a CloudCheckr have approached it more from an application already being in the cloud and drilling down to costs. 

Now we're trying to figure out how to optimize that footprint. What I'm seeing is both those types of companies are starting to meet in the middle where Turbonomic is now starting to add features around cloud cost management and CloudHealth is starting to get down into the Turbonomic side of assessment of what you're trying to move to the cloud.

I can start to see the melding of that space over time, where there are more and more of these on-prem application performance management APS-type of applications. They are starting to bleed up into the cloud and the cloud and cloud applications are starting to bleed down that on-prem world.

We're a reseller. There are two different models. We're a reseller of CloudHealth. We're a reseller of Dell. We're a reseller of VMware. We also use those products internally.

We use it daily. It's one of our core tools within our Zones Cloud Platforms tool bag, when we're looking at how we help customers optimize their cloud spend across their Azure and AWS environments today.

It's a cloud-native application.

In terms of CloudHealth, I have not dug underneath the covers as to where do they actually host it. CloudHealth just got bought by VMware about six or eight months ago, or maybe almost a year ago now. I'm pretty sure that they built on a public cloud. I'm just not sure which public cloud they actually built it on.

I would advise new users to get a demo, take a look at it, dig into some of the analytics and the reporting. It's really one of those tools that you'd need to have hands-on time with. You can go through the presentations, you can look at the high level, but you really need to have a public account, an AWS account, a Google account, an Amazon account, and then tie that to your CloudHealth environment during the demo, or during your proof of concept. When you test, you can make changes in your environment and see how it replicates and how CloudHealth presents that data back to you. That real-time reviewing and seeing the cause and the effect is what really helps you understand what the platform can do. And it helps you have a better understanding of its features and capabilities and how in-depth the reporting and the analytics are compared to a CloudCheckr or other third-party applications that are out there.

The last piece I'd also throw out there is that one of the biggest challenges I think that people are having right now, when it comes to a CloudHealth or a cloud cost analytics product, is that most of the independents have been acquired. There was a product called Cloudyn. That got bought by Microsoft. Now Cloudyn's baked into Azure in what they call Azure Cost Management. Google's acquired a couple of companies over the years, and they have their Google Cloud Cost Management and multi-cloud orchestration and all this fun stuff. CloudHealth got bought by VMware. CloudCheckr is one of the only ones that's still independent in that cloud cost management space. Outside of that, there's some smaller niche players, however, it's getting hard to find an independent. You pretty much have to go and buy one of these products from VMware.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. 

If they can start to improve how they work across other SaaS applications - not just infrastructure as a service - they would get higher marks. If I rated them just from an infrastructure as a service play, I'd probably put them at a nine or a 9.5 simply due to the fact that they do a really, really good job in that space. However, it's a bit of a niche. It's an important niche and it really is helpful in that specific spot, however, it leaves me having to want to find another tool to do the other half of the job and where ideally if it was one tool, I'd take that eight up to a nine and a half. As it is, right now, I rate it as an eight as it doesn't give me all of that features. I have to use multiple tools to get the end result I'm looking for.

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. 

We've been using this solution for two years.

It's stable. For report presentation, it's been fast. Sometimes there are unexpected errors.

It's scalable. So far, we have used it on multiple accounts. It's quite easy.

Technical support is good and has been responsive.

I would rate then 4 out of 5.

Compared to AWS, the historic data on CloudHealth is a lot more helpful. From the AWS perspective, I think the historic data is not able to give us the full set of data. It would make a difference if we could automate the reports when we wanted to.

Setup is straightforward. 

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

I would recommend CloudHealth, but I think AWS and other solutions are catching up. 

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.

The performance and accuracy of Cloud Health need to be improved. Right now, the data is not very accurate. We have to always validate it with some other data. Accuracy is something that is very important to us, especially in terms of cost management. 

Sometimes the tools aren't as responsive as I would like. they are occasionally slow. Sometimes it takes ten seconds to load the tools. 

Technical support could be better.

I'd prefer it if the solution was a bit cheaper.

I've used the solution for the last two years or so. It's been a while now. 

The product is a stable product. While the data itself is not yet accurate, and we have to always look at and validate the data, the solution does give good information sometimes.

The solution is very easy to scale. 

We have about 20 people that work with the solution in our organization.

Technical support isn't as good as I would like it to be. They need faster response times and they need to provide more qualified personnel. 

I also have experience with Central ITCS, which I've used for a few months.

Both the products have a good amount of features and functionality. Which is better depends upon what kind of usage your end customer needs. For example, if I'm a startup and I'm not interested in a lot of features, CloudHealth is a good option. If I'm only interested in a couple of features, then I may go with Central ITCS. 

The initial setup is a simple process. For any technical person, if the steps are provided, it's very easy. There isn't too much complexity involved. 

Maintenance is not a big concern for the end-users as it is a cloud-based service. Updates, for example, happen automatically and any new features, et cetera, are announced ahead of time.  

There is a technical team member associated with this product, and they really have helped us with the onboarding process.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee. The pricing, overall, is pretty reasonable. 

I have compared the solution to other products. I would say that Cloud Health has tremendous scope, and is on many clouds, including Google Cloud, Amazon, AWS, and Azure. It may even be on Oracle soon. Its scope is great and it's a very adaptable solution. It employs its features more effectively than other options in the market. 

We're an end-user of the product.

We are using the latest version of this solution. 

I would recommend this product for people who are more established in this cloud business and would like to help their end customers in optimizing for faster performance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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 solution doesn't offer the best functionality, unfortunately. Some features just simply aren't on offer. The solution needs to offer more product milestones.

They need to improve the solution's integration with GCP. In terms of the integration with GCP, they haven't found a way that they can fully integrate with GCP. That is their weakness, and they should improve it.

The billing integration is quite a difficult process. Part of the sale is convincing the client about how seamless the process is, and right now, it's not. Enterprise clients cannot review their billing records freely, and that's a real issue.

Migration can be hard. They need to offer some better migration tools to make the process much faster and easier.

They need to provide an on-premise version to telecom operators. Currently, they are not. They didn't offer on-premise solutions and yet, it's what our clients require. It affects telecoms in particular because of data privacy and traditional company policies that do not like the idea of transferring information to the cloud.

We've been working with the solution for two months now.

The solution is very stable. There are no problems at all with its reliability. There's no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash.

I believe the solution to be scalable. I don't think there are any scalability issues at all, and organizations that need to expand should have no problem doing so.

While most of our clients are enterprise level, it may be a solution that could work for smaller or more medium-sized enterprises, depending on their comfort levels with the price points.

We've reached out to technical support in the past and were very satisfied with the results. they have been great. They're very responsive and knowledgeable.

We have some experience with RackWare and Red Hat. Right now, I believe this solution to be number one in the market. It's great for central management. We can manage more than one client on a cloud quite easily. It also has the most features out of the three.

The initial setup is very easy, however, we need to get our enterprise customer to be migrated into our organization. That's the difficult thing, due to the fact that our enterprise clients have their own organization admin in each public cloud. It's very difficult to convince our enterprise clients to switch over.

However, once they agree, the migration and necessary processes are very easy.

Deployment, however, is a bit complex. It's not easy to deploy it in a quick way, due to the fact that we have to build an integration between CloudHealth to our telecom billing systems. That's difficult. The telecom billing system is very complicated.

We handle the implementation for our clients. We have some integrations ourselves that we handle, however, we do get some external help for some other integrations that need to be done. This is because the billing from each public cloud does not directly go through to the public vendor, and therefore have to go through a local agent. It requires an external specialist.

The solution can be quite expensive. We tend to charge the clients and make some money on the margins, however, overall, it's a pricey option.

We're CloudHealth partners and resellers of the solution.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using, however, I do believe it to be the most updated version.

New users need to be aware if they decide to go with this solution, that the migration won't exactly be easy.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall.

I started looking into this solution because we needed something more to simplify and help manage if you have different vendors with cloud solutions. We looked at the price, as well as what should replace certain things in an easier way that was fast and easy.

We use this solution to see how it can create dashboards for different parts of the world.

This solution is fast and very easy to understand, even if you are not a technician. You can use it very easily with the dashboard. Overall, it's very easy to start using it.

For me, I think that it is one of the most complete products available now.

It's an extremely good product. You can use it on-premises or on the cloud.

If you are working with the OS you need help and other connectors to get more information.

When you start logging, you just log, but you need to see what you can do with the log to start working with it. Once you start actually working with the log, you can see what you need to do with the tools to automatically do things.

VMware has whatever you want. If you want network security, with load balancing, with absolution, then most of it is connected. Often, VMware and Dell EMC are connected. It's rather integrated. This can be a problem in the future because if you use Cisco in the core, the network would like to have the connection into the defined data center. It functions today, but you have to rethink how you use things.

Now that it's a part of the VMware family instead of a product on its own, it can use other features that are with VMware.

I have been working with this solution for about a year.

I think that it is the most stable product, but it depends on VMware.

In 2001, I started with VMware. At that time it was known for being strong for developers. If you asked me then I would say that it was more for developers and not for use in production. Even if it came from the same mainframe that they have with the same utilization and communication.

Now it's rather stable. They bought some good companies that they have included in their solution. It also depends on the price. 

We are deeply connected to VMware here in the North of Europe. We have reached the highest partner level and we work with a consulting group sometimes.

The technical support is extremely good. Also, some of the vendors, for example, Veeam and some others are knowledgable, with a good understanding of VMware. Even if you work with HP. Now, the VMware support is through HP. 

The type of support depends on your environment. If you work with other hypervisors, you have the same and they are good to help you with issues.

The community for these types of vendors is also very helpful.

We had another product but it was a bit too complicated to use.

I work with VRealize Operations Suite also. All of the Cloud Suite.

It was easy for me because the customer is German, the owner is German, and I work with the Swedish part of it. We have this cloud journey with different answers, on cloud or on-premises, so we need to see where we should place all of our load. It also depends on where in the world we use it.

When you start to virtualize things it gets very expensive.

The licensing fees depend on how big the company is. If you are a larger company then you have a better contract with a better price. The price is different for a small company.

Competitors are cheaper. The quality is not the same but the price is lower so some people will choose the solution based on the price. 

It's purchased by the package. VRealize Operation Suite is the largest, but if you are a small company you may not be able to afford it and you may not be able to use all of the opportunities because it is so expensive.

If you are a large company then you can cut the personnel costs instead.

If you start working with this solution then you will know what you can achieve with this product.

It's better to have a large product to see what you can achieve with it because, quite often, they don't even know what they want from it and why.

If you have started on the cloud journey, you don't use everything. With the OS, they show their tools and they do everything. Maybe on-premises they have all of the information that you need to use.

You will need to access to see where working with an on-premises version would be better than the cloud in terms of cost.

It's a good start to making better decisions.

I have looked at others and this solution is the best. One of the reasons I started to use the solution was that I needed to see things rather quickly. It's the easiest to start with.

Overall, it's one of the best products because it's easy to use and has a great dashboard. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

We have been using VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth for five years.

The product's stability is extremely good.

The technical support services need improvement.

The initial setup process is simple.

I rate VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth an eight out of ten.