As companies continue to invest, adopt, and grow into cloud, as well as manage a strong public and hybrid cloud environment, it is very important to understand what are the common pain points of their sub-organizations. According to the State of FinOps 2023 report from the FinOps Foundation, more than 60 percent of respondents indicated that they are still in the Crawl maturity phase of their FinOps journey; however, they are also focused on cloud cost visibility, optimization, and developer efficiency.
Here comes Tanzu CloudHealth!
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is a global leader in multi-cloud cost management, helping over 20,000 customers around the world optimize and control billions of dollars in multi-cloud spend. Tanzu CloudHealth helps customers track their total cost of ownership (TCO), and offers the following capabilities to improve cloud cost visibility:
- Insights into cloud cost anomalies
- Near real-time tracking of asset and cost data
- Deep savings opportunities with rightsizing and automation
- Platform-wide control for decentralized management of cloud infrastructure within the deepest levels of management chains
Tanzu CloudHealth is the solution that allows you to take control of all the phases of FinOps maturity within your organization.
The FinOps Foundation has laid out these three phases of FinOps, while Tanzu CloudHealth provides capabilities across these three components so that you can map your organization’s complete TCO story.
Inform via cloud FinOps
In the first phase, customers are provided with multi-cloud visibility into cloud spending and able to split up shared costs and attribute them to the teams that incurred those costs. Visibility and effective allocation to the lines of businesses (LOBs) is key to any successful organization, because if your developers don’t know how much they’re costing the business when they choose to spin that fancy new resource in the cloud, then they can’t make better decisions when they're developing applications.
With Tanzu CloudHealth, you have the power of a single platform where you can better track your cloud cost spend, including data center and major public clouds (e.g., Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) across your business personas. Customers get timely insights into variable and anomalous spend via enriched AI/ML models, including superior root cause analysis and enhanced forecast and budgeting with timely information curated for relevant stakeholders. Below are some additional features for specific roles:
- FinOps practitioners – Allocate shared costs via the Cost Reallocation and Custom Line Items feature for better chargeback and showback.
- Developers – Take advantage of programmatic control of their infrastructure thanks to advanced APIs.
- Cloud architects – Manage IT assets with advanced tag management and curation features, build perspectives around datasets, and slice and dice their bills via various cost and usage reports by cloud, datetime, region, account, tags, application owners, LOB, etc.
Machine learning powered forecasting in Tanzu CloudHealth
Optimize by driving deeper savings
After you have cloud cost visibility, your organization can then optimize operations to improve efficiency. Tanzu CloudHealth provides rate and usage optimization features to manage commitment-based discounts, rightsize your underutilized resources, automate your savings potential, and provide a health check view of your waste. Additionally, organizations can implement policies and controls in processes to ensure that wasted spend is monitored by: turning off resources during downtime, staying on budget, and meeting your application performance needs on a continuous basis.
With newer services being added for rightsizing your infrastructure, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Virtual Machines, Kubernetes etc., we can provide deeper savings every month.
Rightsizing dashboard in Tanzu CloudHealth
Operate by shifting left
All companies want to define and execute processes that drive towards their business goals continuously. Modernizing the processes so that the LOBs in a company can decentralize the control to depths of the organization, allows for better alignment of cloud cost management.
Tanzu CloudHealth sets an organization up for multi-cloud success. It brings in expertise and tools that allows engineers (who spin resources to run and manage workloads), executives (who set the business strategy and direction), and finance (who manage budget, allocation, and chargeback) to have a decentralized view via our Flex family of tools, namely FlexReports and FlexOrgs.
FlexReports allows you to create custom reports under all granularities and across clouds. Its enhanced SQL provisioning, charting, and meta-data management feature provides granular control and reporting to the depths of the organizations. This includes various cost and usage dataset management, including container workloads. With increased importance in the market and strong investment towards business intelligence, this experience is only going to get richer by the day within the Tanzu CloudHealth platform.
FlexOrgs is another key feature that allows you to set superior management hierarchies so that you can manage access and permissions of data across different user groups.
Azure daily cost and usage FlexReport
Next steps
Looking to learn more about VMware Tanzu CloudHealth and FinOps? Sign up for a free trial to test out Tanzu CloudHealth, and download a free copy of the eBook Cloud FinOps, Second Edition.
About the Author
More Content by Sowmya Sundararagavan
