IBM Cloudability is a cloud cost management and optimization tool that enables IT, finance, and business teams to optimize their costs and communicate the business value of the cloud.
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Spot by NetApp
Score 6.4 out of 10
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Spot by NetApp, now including CloudCheckr, helps companies to run their cloud investments. The Spot product suite uses machine learning and analytics to automate and optimize cloud infrastructure, to ensure that workloads and applications always have the best possible infrastructure that is available, scalable and available at the lowest possible cost. Spot’s technology provides insights into cloud costs, recommendations for how to optimize utilization and costs, and automation to implement…
I have used CloudHealth, CloudCheckr (since acquired by Spot) and Pileus (now Anodot) are prior companies.
CloudHealth is really the only tool that compares well with Apptio Cloudability. CloudCheckr has a very clunky UI and is totally absent of Business Mapping features. Anodot…
Cloudability has more calculated fields for the CUR information, simplifying the reporting process. The performance of the tool for dashboarding and reporting is much faster as well as far more flexible. Being able to easily create reports and surface them to users with a few …
We found that Apptio Cloudability fit our use cases from reporting to dashboards from the visibility point of view. We really liked the Views functionality which made it easy to customize different business and account segments. We selected this because our users were familiar …
Cloudability boasts great visualizations but lacks the ability to customize reports and does not address any aspects of cloud management other than cost. CloudHealth is a viable competitor to CloudCheckr. CloudHealth does not have the breadth of reporting capabilities but …
I think if you are maybe small in your cloud spend and you're only in one cloud, I think you can probably get away with just using the cost management tool in that cloud vendor. I don't think it's necessary for everyone and I think you have to have enough optimizations to have your return on investment, but it's certainly suited if you plan to grow and you're still small, get it now and don't wait.
CloudCheckr is fantastic for those that are purely in the Cloud as it provides everything you need under one roof for a comprehensive configuration and usage monitoring tool. It has SysLog capabilities though so you can farm out the alerts into a SIEM or other log management system, so hybrid environments could also benefit from its use.
Detailed Best Practices. It's important to align your cloud to industry best practices for security and cost—it just performs better if it's used the way it's meant to be used. AWS is very flexible, and that's great when you have special requirements, but you've got to at least know when you're using something in a non-standard way so you can think through the implications.
Cost Reduction. Some recommendations are almost impossible to make at least for our setup, but many, many others are easy. We only have to log into CloudCheckr every few months and make a few changes for it to more than pay for itself.
Right-Sizing. This is related to the other points, but for some reason is separate from their cost module. The metrics it's able to pull only tell half the story, so it's good to verify it's sizing recommendations before making changes. But it does show you what instances to focus on first, and even if you choose a slightly different size to move it to, it does clearly indicate it's current size isn't appropriate. And this works both ways, if the size is too big, you can save some cash by making it smaller, but if it's too small, you want to be sure to scale up before you run into performance problems.
There is currently no ability to apply global filters over the data in cloudability. Rather users must go through a difficult process to create custom views which they are later able to apply over top of their datasets.
Drill functionality does not really exists but appears to be more of an after though add-on. Yes you are able to "drill" but the visuals disappear and even the ability to export the more detailed information.
CloudCheckr features have a tendency to break without warning. Functionality in place for months could suddenly stop working.
CloudCheckr support often delays work on support tickets for fixing broken application functionality.
The CloudCheckr platform and documentation website often crash or experience performance degradation.
CloudCheckr cost reporting is often impacted by faulty code or broken report functionality. This can contribute to a low level of confidence in CloudCheckr's ability to deliver accurate cost reporting.
Very strong tool, nearly as clunky as older tools like CloudCheckr and much more fully featured than newer tools like Pileus. It's easy to get started with drilling into data for experienced FinOps users; others end users have a learning curve, but I don't think that's specific to Apptio Cloudability. The biggest drawback I find is the tool is buggier than others (e.g. CloudHealth), and constantly having to refresh a browser makes for a poor user experience.
Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.
Training was adequate, but the real learning begins when you start using the product, like most things. All major functions were covered so as an entry point, was a good introduction to the product. The training pace was good as well, the areas were covered in decent depth, without being too much of an information overload.
Cloudability has more calculated fields for the CUR information, simplifying the reporting process. The performance of the tool for dashboarding and reporting is much faster as well as far more flexible. Being able to easily create reports and surface them to users with a few clicks provides much greater benefits over the dashboarding and reporting within CloudCheckr. CloudCheckr does have a more robust resource inventory reporting system with lots of services and data fields. Cloudy surfaces a great deal more opportunities for rightsizing than CloudCheckr too
There are a few products out there that'll do an aspect or two of what CloudCheckr does, but I honestly couldn't find anything nearly as comprehensive as CloudCheckr.
Positive - as our utilization of Cloud platforms has increased, getting better reporting has been a key objective and Cloudability has allowed us to achieve this.
Positive - has allowed us to find opportunities for Cloud savings and improve our utilization of Cloud resources.