Cloudability vs CloudHealth: In-depth Comparison

‍As organizations increasingly rely on cloud computing for their IT infrastructure, managing cloud costs has become critical. Cloudability and CloudHealth are two leading cloud cost management solutions that provide organizations with the tools to monitor, analyze, and optimize their cloud environments. Despite serving the same purpose, the two differ in functionality. 

In this comparison, we explore their key differences, examining their features and how they address different organizational needs, seeking to optimize their cloud costs and resources.

Cloudability and CloudHealth are leading cloud cost management solutions that provide organizations with tools to monitor, analyze, and optimize their cloud environments. Cloudability offers automated budget management and cost-saving recommendations, while CloudHealth focuses on comprehensive cost accounting and modeling for precise spend tracking. Both platforms support multi-cloud management and provide valuable insights to control spending and enhance cloud efficiency. 

The choice between the two will depend on the specific needs and goals of the organization, with Cloudability's automation and CloudHealth's detailed reporting catering to different priorities.

What is Cloudability?

Cloudability developed by Apptio is a cloud cost management platform enabling businesses to monitor, optimize, and manage their cloud costs and usage. The platform offers  visibility into cloud infrastructure, enabling you to track spending patterns across all teams/departments/projects. You can allocate resources to each segment, set budgets to control expenses, and identify cost-saving opportunities. 

Cloudability is specifically designed for enterprises aiming to establish a "Cloud Center of Excellence." Equipped with robust FinOps capabilities, it improved cloud cost management and operational efficiency, ensuring the protection of your margins.

Key Features

Here are some of the key features you can exploit in Apptio's Cloudability:

• Tagging: The platform allows you to group your cloud resources through tags and labels to enhance visibility and allow users and stakeholders to analyze, measure, and report on your applications easily. Using Cloudability's Tag Explorer, you can implement tags, edit groups, identify untagged resources, and gain comprehensive insights on your cloud spend.
• Business Mapping: This is a rules-based engine that uses powerful declarative language to categorize cloud spending. It enables full integration with IT Ops and FinOps processes, seamlessly allowing you to optimize the unit economics of a given application or business unit. Thus, it bridges the gaps between IT, finance, and business teams, eliminates project delays, and bolsters team confidence.
• Customizable Dashboard: Cloudability offers a user-friendly and customizable dashboard that provides a detailed view of your company's key performance indicators. You have increased flexibility in designing the dashboard according to your enterprise's needs, a prerequisite as cloud infrastructures keep changing.
• Budgeting and Forecasting: Cloudability makes it easy to set budgets and forecast cloud spending by accurately tracking current spending trends, using data science models to predict future spending, and proactively monitoring and managing your budgets per your business requirements.
• Notifications and Alerts: You can set alerts to notify you when the budget limit for a particular cloud service account has been exceeded. This will allow you to take proactive measures to control cloud spending and eliminate unnecessary expenses.

Pros

• Cloudability offers comprehensive visibility and transparency into your cloud usage and costs across multiple cloud service providers and accounts, providing you with the data you need to manage your cloud infrastructure effectively. 
• It can be seamlessly integrated with major cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, ensuring smooth operations and reliable performance.
• By leveraging its capabilities, you can unlock the full potential of the platform for optimized cloud cost management, helping you reduce expenses and maximize value. 

Cons

• For beginners unfamiliar with cloud management tools, Cloudability's interface and features may pose a challenge due to their complexity.
• Implementing Cloudability can be time-consuming and complicated, particularly for companies with diverse cloud environments, which may pose difficulties during the initial setup phase.

What is CloudHealth?

CloudHealth, offered by VMware, is a multi-cloud management platform designed to manage, optimize, and govern your cloud infrastructure across multiple cloud services. This tool streamlines resource management processes, aiming to enhance cost savings, performance, and security. CloudHealth manages over $8 billion in total cloud spending across several vendors and is used by millions of users worldwide.

By offering unparalleled visibility into your cloud environment, CloudHealth offers data insights that clearly outline your organization's cloud spending. The platform is a centralized hub to simplify customer management and streamline billing activities. 

Key Features

By using CloudHealth, you have access to the following features that enhance your cloud management experience:

• Rightsizing and Waste Deduction: CloudHealth can identify overprovisioned or underutilized instances and quickly terminate them to reduce the financial burden on your cloud bill. You can set custom thresholds and gain actionable rightsizing recommendations based on your workload requirements.
• Kubernetes Optimization: CloudHealth provides access to optimization features specially tailored for Kubernetes environments. You can get customizable recommendations for rightsizing resources and allocating costs to maximize the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your Kubernetes deployments.
• Resource Management: CloudHealth offers greater control over user access and resource management by properly aligning cloud data required for your business. You can dynamically allocate assets to different business groups and analyze your cloud infrastructure to understand the costs incurred and usage of resources. 
• Automated Cloud Governance: CloudHealth allows you to proactively identify opportunities to reduce cloud spending and operations risks. You can also automate the continuous monitoring of your cloud environment, from keeping operational activities consistent to streamlining configuration processes to avoid deviations from desired outcomes.
• Commitment Discounts: CloudHealth's commitment discounts help you save time and money by automating the management of your reservations. Its purchasing, optimization, and amortization capabilities help reduce operational costs and manage discounts to maximize overall savings. 

Pros

• CloudHealth streamlines the process of monitoring activities across all your platforms and subscriptions, offering enhanced visibility into your multi-cloud environments. It also allows you to generate multi-cloud reports to track usage and costs. 
• The Asset Tagging feature enables you to categorize your resources based on set parameters and manage access to specific sources. This feature is compatible with major cloud service providers, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Cons

• While CloudHealth supports major cloud service providers, there are variances in functionality across each platform. For instance, Azure does not support case-sensitive tag keys, and GCP allows more tags than Azure and AWS.
• CloudHealth caters primarily to large organizations and may not be as suitable for smaller, growing companies due to its scale and complexity.

Differences Between Cloudability and CloudHealth 

Now that we've developed a fundamental understanding of what Cloudability and CloudHealth do, here's a comprehensive comparison of both tools based on several factors that set each other apart:

1. Deployment and Ease of Use

Both Cloudability and CloudHealth prioritize user experience and ease of deployment, making it simpler to manage and optimize your cloud infrastructure. Each tool offers unique features that contribute to seamless cloud management.

Cloudability

• Easy Integration: Cloudability integrates smoothly with multiple cloud providers and platforms, allowing for straightforward deployment and a streamlined user experience.
• Intuitive Interface: The tool features a user-friendly dashboard and intuitive interface that simplifies navigation and makes accessing key insights and reports easy.
• Comprehensive Documentation: Cloudability provides extensive documentation and resources to assist users with setup, customization, and ongoing management.

CloudHealth

• Flexible Deployment Options: CloudHealth offers a variety of deployment options, including cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid solutions, to suit different business needs.
• User-Friendly Interface: The platform is designed with ease of use in mind, featuring a clean and organized interface that facilitates quick access to essential tools and data.
• Guided Onboarding: CloudHealth provides guided onboarding and training resources, enabling users to learn how to utilize the platform's features effectively quickly.

In summary, both Cloudability and CloudHealth offer easy deployment and user-friendly interfaces. Your choice may depend on the deployment options that best align with your existing infrastructure and the level of support you require during onboarding and ongoing management.

2. Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloudability and CloudHealth are two powerful tools for cost optimization in cloud environments. They are designed to help businesses manage cloud expenses effectively and identify potential cost-saving opportunities. While both tools offer unique features tailored to different business needs, they share the common goal of optimizing cloud costs.

Cloudability

• Committed Use Discount Management: Cloudability helps manage committed use discounts, ensuring businesses make the most of their reserved instance investments.
• Idle Resource Detection: The tool identifies idle resources within the cloud environment, enabling businesses to eliminate wastage and save costs.
• Integrated Spot Management: This feature automates the management of spot or interruptible instances available at lower rates. This unique capability is not present in CloudHealth.

CloudHealth

• Committed Use Discount Management: Like Cloudability, CloudHealth manages committed use discounts for reserved instances.
• Idle Resource Detection: It provides idle resource detection to identify and eliminate unused resources, improving cost efficiency.
• Autopilot Instance Management: CloudHealth features an autopilot instance management function that optimizes cloud instances for maximum cost savings and resource utilization. This is a distinct advantage over Cloudability.

While both tools excel in committed use discount management and idle resource detection, CloudHealth's autopilot instance management stands out as a superior feature compared to Cloudability's integrated spot management. By optimizing resource allocation and eliminating idle resources, it offers greater cost savings and enhanced cloud performance.

3. Security

Data security and integrity are essential in cloud infrastructure, particularly for large organizations operating multi-cloud environments. Both Cloudability and CloudHealth offer distinct security features to safeguard your data and information against cybersecurity threats and unauthorized access.

Cloudability

• Role-Based Access Controls: Cloudability provides role-based access controls, allowing you to set permissions based on user roles. This restricts unauthorized actions and enhances security.
• Comprehensive Technical Controls: Cloudability includes a range of technical controls such as connection security, network security, data segregation, authentication, authorization, and backup and disaster recovery. These controls work together to protect user data.

CloudHealth

• Identity and Access Management (IAM): CloudHealth offers IAM functionality, allowing you to manage access and permissions effectively.
• Cost Tracking for Security Issues: The tool utilizes real-time detection, automation, and machine learning to monitor threats and track costs associated with security issues.
• Secure State Service (for AWS): For AWS users, CloudHealth's Secure State service provides enhanced security and compliance features. With over 900 security rules and 18+ compliance frameworks (e.g., CIS, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001), it helps eliminate compliance risks.

Both Cloudability and CloudHealth offer robust security features. The choice between the two depends on your cloud infrastructure. CloudHealth may be the better choice if you primarily use AWS due to its Secure State service. For other platforms, Cloudability may offer a broader range of security features to meet your needs.

4. Cost Allocation and Chargeback

Both Cloudability and CloudHealth provide comprehensive cost allocation and chargeback features, enabling organizations to effectively distribute cloud expenses across different teams, projects, or departments.

Cloudability

• Flexible Cost Allocation: Cloudability's precision in cost allocation allows you to allocate costs based on various parameters such as tags, accounts, business units, and more. This provides a high level of control over cost distribution, ensuring accurate financial management.
• Customizable Chargeback Reports: The platform offers customizable chargeback reports to help visualize and understand expenses by team, department, or project.
• Automated Cost Distribution: Cloudability can automate cost distribution based on predefined rules, making it easier to manage and assign costs.

CloudHealth

• Detailed Cost Allocation: CloudHealth provides detailed cost allocation options, allowing you to distribute expenses across different teams or projects based on custom tags and metadata.
• Advanced Chargeback Features: CloudHealth offers advanced chargeback features, including customizable chargeback models, to help assign costs in a way that reflects actual usage.
• Insightful Reporting: The platform offers insightful reports that break down expenses by department, project, or resource, giving you a clear understanding of cost drivers.

Both tools offer robust cost allocation and chargeback capabilities, allowing organizations to manage expenses effectively across different business units. Cloudability's strength lies in its automated cost distribution and flexible allocation options, while CloudHealth provides advanced chargeback models and detailed cost breakdowns. Choose the tool that best aligns with your organization's specific cost allocation and chargeback needs.

5. Cost Visibility and Insights

Cloudability and CloudHealth both provide robust features for cost visibility and insights, enabling organizations to monitor, understand, and optimize their cloud spending.

Cloudability

• Granular Cost Insights: Cloudability offers granular insights into your cloud spending, breaking down costs by resource, account, tags, and other parameters.
• Customizable Dashboards and Reports: The platform features customizable dashboards and reports, allowing you to visualize data in the way that best suits your needs.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Cloudability provides real-time monitoring of your cloud expenses, keeping you updated on cost changes as they happen.
• Forecasting and Trends: Offers forecasting and trend analysis based on historical data to help you anticipate future cloud costs and plan accordingly.

CloudHealth

• Comprehensive Cost Reports: CloudHealth offers comprehensive cost reports, providing visibility into your cloud expenses and helping you understand where your money is going.
• Custom Dashboards and Visualizations: The platform allows for custom dashboards and visualizations, making it easy to see data in a way that is meaningful to your organization.
• Real-Time Cost Tracking: CloudHealth provides real-time cost tracking, alerting you to any significant changes in spending as they occur.
• Budgeting and Forecasting Tools: Offers budgeting and forecasting tools to help plan and manage your cloud expenses based on past data and trends.

Both Cloudability and CloudHealth excel in providing cost visibility and insights through real-time monitoring, customizable reports, and dashboards. Cloudability offers granular insights and trend analysis for cost forecasting, while CloudHealth provides comprehensive cost reports and advanced budgeting tools. Choose the platform that best aligns with your needs for monitoring, reporting, and planning your cloud expenses.

6. Pricing Model

When comparing Cloudability and CloudHealth, it's important to consider their pricing models, as they can impact your overall cost management and budgeting strategies.

Cloudability

• Pricing Based on Cloud Spend: Cloudability's pricing model is often based on the size of your cloud spend, typically calculated as a percentage of your total cloud expenses.
• Tiered Pricing Options: The platform may offer tiered pricing options based on your spending levels, allowing you to choose the plan that best suits your budget and usage.

CloudHealth

• Pricing Based on Cloud Spend: Like Cloudability, CloudHealth's pricing is often based on a percentage of your total cloud spend, aligning the cost of the service with your cloud usage.
• Tiered Pricing Structure: CloudHealth may offer a tiered pricing structure, allowing you to select a plan based on your cloud spend and the level of service you require.

Both Cloudability and CloudHealth offer pricing models based on cloud spend, providing tiered plans to match different levels of usage and business needs. When choosing between the two, consider which pricing structure aligns best with your organization's budget and cost management goals. Additionally, inquire with the vendors about any available discounts or negotiation options to optimize your pricing.

Lucidity For Comprehensive Identification & Provisioning of Cloud Storage

While Cloudability and CloudHealth offer valuable insights into cloud costs and storage metrics, such as overprovisioned and underused resources, they lack block storage optimization capabilities that adjust capacities in real-time. Manually provisioning storage resources requires ongoing effort from DevOps teams, which can be time-consuming and may lead to operational disruptions that affect your company's performance and financial resources.

A 2023 study by Virtana titled "State of Hybrid Cloud Storage" surveyed 350 IT professionals and found that 94% experienced rising cloud storage costs, with 54% reporting that their storage expenses surpassed their overall cloud bill. These findings highlight the need for advanced block storage optimization tools that provide multi-cloud functionality and automate storage management, reducing the need for human intervention.

By adopting such tools, organizations can streamline storage management, reduce operational disruptions, and achieve better financial efficiency.

Lucidity offers solutions to the challenges companies face with cloud storage, providing a remedy for the following common issues:

1. Wasted Costs Due to Overprovisioning: Organizations often allocate more storage capacity than necessary, resulting in inflated cloud bills due to unused storage. Additionally, underprovisioning can lead to exceeding storage limits, causing downtime that negatively affects performance and finances.
2. Unpredictable Workloads: Fluctuations in workload demands arise from seasonal changes, sudden growth phases, and unforeseen events. These unpredictable shifts can lead to either overprovisioning or underprovisioning of block storage, both of which threaten a company's financial resources and overall performance.
3. Complex Storage Management: Manually optimizing block storage is a labor-intensive and complex task that requires significant time and effort from DevOps teams. This approach is less accurate and prone to errors. In multi-cloud environments, storage management becomes even more challenging, as manual scaling creates delays between demand and fulfillment, impacting application performance and user experiences.

Lucidity's solutions address these issues by offering advanced block storage optimization tools that streamline storage management across multiple clouds. By automating the process and adapting to changing demands in real-time, Lucidity helps organizations maintain optimal storage levels, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Lucidity's Block Storage Auto-scaler effectively addresses the challenges faced by companies with cloud storage:

1. Scaling Without Downtime: The auto-scaler dynamically adjusts storage resources without interrupting performance or functionality. This prevents downtime and maintains consistent operational efficiency.
2. Real-Time Rightsizing: Lucidity automatically scales block storage up or down in real-time. As usage increases, the auto-scaler seamlessly expands storage capacities to support smooth application operation. When usage decreases, it reduces storage allocation to avoid unnecessary costs.
3. Continuous Monitoring: The auto-scaler continuously monitors and analyzes your storage usage patterns and metrics to understand your current requirements and anticipate future needs. This proactive approach ensures optimal storage management and efficient resource allocation. 

Lucidity's Storage Audit solution provides a comprehensive analysis of storage usage patterns, highlighting idle resources and redundant practices that can be streamlined. This week-long audit is conducted automatically and at no cost, saving DevOps teams the time and effort required for manual audits. This allows them to focus on high-value tasks that enhance productivity.

Upon completion, Lucidity generates a detailed report outlining current storage inefficiencies, idle resources, risky areas, and opportunities for further cost savings. The report includes metrics such as present disk spend and disk downtime risks, offering actionable insights that help optimize your infrastructure and reduce costs.

Lucidity is the industry's first storage orchestration tool that automates the expansion and live shrinkage of storage resources. While Cloudability and CloudHealth offer comprehensive storage monitoring capabilities, Lucidity goes beyond by adjusting storage resources in real-time based on your company's needs.

How Does Lucidity Work?

To start using Lucidity, you just have to grant IAM permissions and onboard your volumes, which takes an hour.

Once integrated into your cloud infrastructure, Lucidity enhances your cloud's block storage capabilities and can seamlessly work with leading cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

After the integration, Lucidity collects real-time metrics, including disk utilization, throughput, volume, burst, IOPS, and other relevant parameters. Lucidity's auto-scaler engine analyze these metrics, identifying usage patterns, predicting future storage needs, and deciding whether current block storage should be expanded or reduced.

The tool then automatically scales your storage volumes according to your customizations while maintaining adherence to data security and compliance standards. This seamless process optimizes your storage resources in real-time for improved efficiency and cost savings.

By incorporating Lucidity into your cloud infrastructure, you unlock numerous benefits that can revolutionize your organization's operational capabilities and maximize your cloud's potential.

• Zero Downtime and Increased Productivity: Lucidity's auto-scaler efficiently provisions the required storage quickly, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual provisioning that can disrupt operations. Maintenance activities and exceeding disk utilization can lead to downtime, issues that Lucidity automatically resolves to enhance productivity.

• Enhanced Operational Efficiency and Cost savings: Lucidity's automated storage provisioning eliminates the need to allocate extra, unused storage, resulting in cost savings of up to 70% on your overall cloud bill. Automation ensures higher accuracy and reduces errors that might occur during manual processes. To further optimize costs, you can utilize Lucidity's ROI Calculator, which uses metrics such as disk spend, growth rate, and utilization.

• Customized Policy: Lucidity allows you to create and configure custom policies for the storage provisioning process. By setting parameters such as policy name, desired utilization, maximum disk size, and buffer size, you can establish efficient protocols while Lucidity adheres to your policies, ensuring proper management and meeting your specific requirements.

• Seamless Integration: Lucidity integrates smoothly with cloud environments through API or agent-based methods. Its focus on automation enables swift integration and deployment, minimizing the risk of performance bottlenecks.

After delving into the features and advantages of Lucidity, take the next step by contacting us for a personalized demo. Discover how our advanced automation technology streamlines your cloud storage management and meets your specific needs.

Choosing the Right Cloud Management Platform: Cloudability vs CloudHealth

In conclusion, both Cloudability and CloudHealth offer robust cloud management platforms that help organizations optimize their cloud environments, control costs, and maintain compliance. Cloudability is known for its advanced cost management and forecasting capabilities, making it a strong choice for organizations seeking deep insights into their cloud spending and usage. On the other hand, CloudHealth provides a comprehensive suite of features encompassing cost optimization, security, governance, and performance monitoring, offering a holistic approach to managing multi-cloud environments.

When deciding between Cloudability and CloudHealth, organizations should consider their specific needs, budgets, and the complexity of their cloud infrastructure. Both platforms have their strengths, and the choice ultimately depends on which features align best with the organization's goals and priorities. In some cases, a hybrid approach may even be beneficial, using both platforms to leverage their unique strengths and achieve a more comprehensive cloud management strategy.