Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
2023-09-12T15:23:32Z
Sep 12, 2023
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.
Cloud Advisor Specialist at Converge Technology Solutions Corp
Consultant
Top 5
2023-01-09T19:31:23Z
Jan 9, 2023
The export features regarding CSV files and specifically around identifying savings plans have room for improvement, as well as the drill-down features for reservation utilization.
It would be helpful to have a mobile version or a tablet version, especially for people who are outside of the office. We are missing role-based access. The team should be able to see only the cost related to their spending and not the entire organization's spending. So the people who are logging into the application should see only their expenses.
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.
Delivery Manager at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2021-10-11T12:05:45Z
Oct 11, 2021
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.
Learn what your peers think about VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
Director Cloud Program & Platform Strategy at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
MSP
2021-04-01T23:00:54Z
Apr 1, 2021
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.
They should improve some of their custom rule creation capabilities and make it easier to create custom rules. I think the dashboards could be improved. They could have better compliance and security dashboards. That would probably make it look better because currently, it's kind of a fast dashboard. It's a nice, slick-looking dashboard, but it's kind of confusing because of the tabs — security and policy are in different tabs. There is a recommendations tab with security and policy, and also a security tab with other policies in it. There is also a separate tab for governance. We have security in each of those tabs but that doesn't really make sense. It's not really intuitive to have those tabs like that. In short, it could have easier tabs, better dashboards, and better custom rule creation capabilities. Other tools out there that I've used, including Divvycloud, Lacework, and Prisma, have features for remediating issues that come up. Still, some tools like Prisma, don't have all of the APIs that are needed. I don't understand why they can't just have all the APIs when the native product can.
Product Manager at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Reseller
2020-07-19T08:15:53Z
Jul 19, 2020
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.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
2019-12-11T05:40:00Z
Dec 11, 2019
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.
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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 export features regarding CSV files and specifically around identifying savings plans have room for improvement, as well as the drill-down features for reservation utilization.
It would be helpful to have a mobile version or a tablet version, especially for people who are outside of the office. We are missing role-based access. The team should be able to see only the cost related to their spending and not the entire organization's spending. So the people who are logging into the application should see only their expenses.
I would like to see better integration from CloudHealth to create an easier setup and implementation.
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.
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.
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.
They should improve some of their custom rule creation capabilities and make it easier to create custom rules. I think the dashboards could be improved. They could have better compliance and security dashboards. That would probably make it look better because currently, it's kind of a fast dashboard. It's a nice, slick-looking dashboard, but it's kind of confusing because of the tabs — security and policy are in different tabs. There is a recommendations tab with security and policy, and also a security tab with other policies in it. There is also a separate tab for governance. We have security in each of those tabs but that doesn't really make sense. It's not really intuitive to have those tabs like that. In short, it could have easier tabs, better dashboards, and better custom rule creation capabilities. Other tools out there that I've used, including Divvycloud, Lacework, and Prisma, have features for remediating issues that come up. Still, some tools like Prisma, don't have all of the APIs that are needed. I don't understand why they can't just have all the APIs when the native product can.
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.
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.