
What Is VMware Tanzu CloudHealth?
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is a cloud management platform that helps organizations optimize, monitor, and govern their cloud environments across multiple cloud providers. For organizations managing multi-cloud infrastructures, CloudHealth provides visibility into cloud costs, resource utilization, security, and compliance.
The platform consolidates data from public cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, offering a central interface to manage cloud resources. By providing insights and analytics into cloud spending, CloudHealth enables companies to identify savings opportunities, enforce governance policies, and track cloud usage across teams.
In this article:
- Key Features of VMware CloudHealth
- Why Consider Alternatives to CloudHealth?
- Notable VMware CloudHealth Competitors
Key Features of VMware CloudHealth
CloudHealth offers a range of features to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud environments. Here’s an overview of CloudHealth’s key capabilities:
- Cost management and optimization: CloudHealth provides tools to monitor and manage cloud spending, offering insights into cost allocation and identifying opportunities for savings.
- Multi-cloud support: The platform supports various cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, allowing centralized management of multi-cloud environments.
- Governance and automation: CloudHealth enables the implementation of policies for cost allocation, chargeback, and accountability among departments and teams, enhancing governance and operational efficiency.
- Reporting and analytics: Users can generate customizable reports and dashboards to gain insights into cloud usage, performance, and costs.
- Security and compliance: The platform includes features to monitor security risks and ensure compliance with industry standards.
- Resource management: CloudHealth assists in managing resource inventories, rightsizing, and eliminating idle resources to optimize performance and reduce costs.
- Integration capabilities: The platform integrates with various third-party tools and services, enhancing its functionality and allowing incorporation into existing workflows.
Why Consider Alternatives to CloudHealth?
Organizations may encounter some limitations in CloudHealth that prompt them to explore alternative solutions. These limitations were reported by users on the G2 platform:
- User interface usability: Some users report that CloudHealth's interface can be slow and challenging to navigate, making it difficult to create multidimensional reports.
- Kubernetes visibility: The platform provides limited insights into Kubernetes costs, lacking detailed breakdowns of utilized, idle, and unallocated resources within Kubernetes environments.
- Savings recommendations: CloudHealth's cost-saving suggestions are primarily focused on database and compute services, potentially overlooking other areas where cost optimization could be beneficial.
- Alerting mechanism: The platform relies on manually defined policies with static thresholds for alerting, which may result in excessive false positives or missed critical events.
- Business context integration: CloudHealth does not offer features to monitor unit costs over time, making it challenging to correlate cloud cost increases with business growth or revenue changes.
Notable VMware CloudHealth Competitors
1. Finout
Finout has emerged as a formidable competitor to CloudHealth in the realm of cloud cost management, offering a robust suite of tools tailored to the complex needs of enterprises. Unlike CloudHealth, which has been a longstanding player under VMware’s umbrella, Finout distinguishes itself with its patented Instant Virtual Tagging solution. This innovative feature allows businesses to allocate 100% of their cloud spend instantly, even for untagged resources, across multiple cloud providers and services. By eliminating the dependency on manual tagging, Finout provides a seamless and accurate cost allocation process, enabling enterprises to gain granular visibility into their spending patterns. This capability is particularly valuable for large organizations managing sprawling multi-cloud environments, where traditional tagging methods often fall short due to inconsistencies or oversight.
In addition to its tagging prowess, Finout excels with robust financial planning and forecasting tools, advanced anomaly detection alerts, and intuitive dashboarding, making it a feature-rich parity for enterprise use cases. Its financial planning capabilities leverage historical data to deliver precise forecasts, empowering FinOps teams to set budgets, track commitments, and optimize long-term spending strategies—all within a single platform. The advanced alerts system proactively monitors for cost anomalies, notifying users in real-time via integrations like Slack or email, ensuring swift action to mitigate unexpected spikes. Coupled with customizable dashboards, Finout provides enterprises with actionable insights tailored to diverse stakeholders, from finance to engineering, fostering a collaborative approach to cloud cost governance. This comprehensive feature set positions Finout as a strong alternative to CloudHealth, particularly for businesses seeking scalability, precision, and operational efficiency in their FinOps practices.
Source: Finout
2. IBM Turbonomic
IBM Turbonomic is an application resource management (ARM) platform that continuously optimizes performance, compliance, and cost across hybrid and multicloud environments. It uses AI-based automation to provide applications with the resources to perform efficiently without overprovisioning.
Key features include:
- Full-stack visibility: Provides insights from applications to infrastructure, enabling accurate and cost-effective resource decisions.
- Automation: Automatically adjusts resource allocations, such as scaling and provisioning, to maintain application performance and infrastructure efficiency.
- Cloud cost optimization: Continuously generates actions to match application demand with infrastructure supply, helping to control cloud spending while preserving performance.
- Kubernetes optimization: Optimizes containerized workloads through actions like rightsizing and intelligent cluster scaling, ensuring efficient resource utilization in Kubernetes environments.
- Integration capabilities: Integrates with existing tools and processes, including application performance management systems, to simplify workflows.
Source: IBM
3. Anodot
Anodot is a cloud cost management platform that leverages AI and machine learning to help organizations optimize their cloud expenditures across multicloud, SaaS, and Kubernetes environments.
Key features include:
- Autonomous anomaly detection: Monitors cloud usage patterns to identify irregular spending and usage anomalies, supporting prompt issue resolution
- Comprehensive visibility: Provides end-to-end insights into cloud infrastructure and billing, enabling teams to understand the true cost of SaaS customers and features.
- AI-powered forecasting: Utilizes deep learning to predict future cloud spending based on historical data, aiding in budget planning and resource allocation.
- Kubernetes cost intelligence: Offers reports and dashboards to track spending and usage across Kubernetes clusters, assisting in identifying under-utilization at the node level.
- Savings recommendations: Provides personalized insights to eliminate waste and optimize infrastructure, uncovering unknown saving opportunities that can be implemented efficiently.
Source: Anodot
4. CloudBolt
CloudBolt is a cloud management platform designed to improve cloud ROI by providing solutions that inform, allocate, optimize, automate, govern, and scale cloud operations.
Key features include:
- Augmented FinOps: Integrates financial operations to manage cloud costs effectively, enabling intelligent automation and enhanced insights for better decision-making.
- Hybrid cloud management: Supports management across public, private, and containerized environments, offering flexibility and control over diverse cloud infrastructures.
- Automation and orchestration: Simplifies IT automation workflows, resource provisioning, and configuration management, improving operational efficiency.
- Governance and compliance: Implements policies and guardrails to ensure compliance and optimal performance across cloud environments.
- Integration capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with various tools and platforms, enhancing functioning into existing workflows.
Source: CloudBolt
5. CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is a cloud management platform that provides tools for managing and optimizing cloud infrastructure across multiple providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It offers visibility into cloud costs, resource utilization, security, and compliance, enabling organizations to govern their cloud environments.
Key features include:
- Cost management and optimization: Identifies cost-saving opportunities by analyzing cloud spending patterns, recommending reserved instance purchases, and detecting unused resources.
- Security and compliance monitoring: Performs best practice checks to identify security vulnerabilities and compliance issues.
- Resource inventory and utilization: Provides insights into cloud resources, tracks changes, and offers recommendations for rightsizing and optimizing resource utilization.
- Reporting and analytics: Generates customizable reports and dashboards, offering insights into cloud usage, performance, and costs.
- Automation and remediation: Offers automation capabilities to remediate security and compliance issues, reducing manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.
Source: CloudCheckr
6. Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost management and optimization platform that enables organizations to monitor, analyze, and optimize their cloud expenditures across multiple providers. By providing visibility into cloud spending and usage patterns, Cloudability helps allocate costs and identify savings opportunities.
Key features include:
- Dashboards and reports: Offers customizable dashboards and reports to visualize cloud spend and usage.
- Views: Allows creation of custom views to focus on specific subsets of data.
- True cost explorer: Provides an interactive tool to explore cloud costs in detail, helping users understand spending patterns and identify optimization opportunities.
- Automation: Enables automation of routine tasks such as resource shutdowns and cleanup of unattached volumes.
- Budgets and forecasts: Assists in setting budgets and forecasting cloud spend using data science models.
Source: Apptio
Learn more in our detailed guide to CloudHealth vs Cloudability (coming soon)
7. Yotascale
Yotascale is a cloud cost management platform that provides organizations with visibility and control over their cloud expenditures across multiple providers. It offers real-time insights into cloud usage, enabling organizations to allocate costs accurately, detect anomalies, and optimize resource utilization.
Key features include:
- Visibility: Delivers real-time insights across all cloud services, allowing users to track usage and identify cost drivers.
- Cost allocation: Ensures accurate assignment of cloud costs to the appropriate teams, projects, or departments.
- Optimization tools: Identifies waste and recommends right-sizing opportunities to enhance efficiency without compromising performance.
- Budgeting and forecasting: Provides tools to predict future costs, set budgets aligned with cost centers or teams, and monitor spending against targets in real-time.
- Anomaly detection: Utilizes machine learning to detect cost anomalies and sends alerts to relevant teams for prompt investigation and remediation.
Source: Yotascale
8. Datadog
Datadog is a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, providing visibility into infrastructure, applications, logs, and security metrics. It enables organizations to monitor and optimize their cloud environments, ensuring performance, reliability, and security across various services and platforms.
Key features include:
- Cost visibility: Offers a unified view of cloud expenses across providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as SaaS services such as Snowflake and MongoDB.
- Container and Kubernetes cost allocation: Provides breakdowns of container costs by cluster, namespace, or pod, helping to identify idle resources and optimize container usage.
- Automated cost recommendations: Generates actionable insights by combining observability data with billing information to identify unused or over-provisioned resources.
- Integration with existing workflows: Integrates cost data into engineers' existing dashboards, monitors, and service catalogs.
- Customizable alerts and monitoring: Allows the creation of tailored cost monitors to detect unexpected spending patterns.
Source: Datadog
9. Flexera One
Flexera One is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that provides visibility and control over complex hybrid IT environments. It enables organizations to manage and optimize their technology assets, including hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud resources.
Key features include:
- IT visibility: Offers insights into the entire IT estate, mapping technology assets to business services and identifying opportunities for cost savings and risk reduction.
- IT asset management (ITAM): Provides tools to manage the asset lifecycle, optimize software licenses, ensure compliance, and strengthen positions in vendor negotiations.
- Cloud cost optimization: Delivers capabilities to implement FinOps processes across cloud environments, working with all major cloud service providers to optimize costs and improve efficiency.
- SaaS management: Enables command over SaaS usage and spend, identifying shadow IT, consolidating contracts, and securing data effectively.
- Technology intelligence platform: Leverages next-generation data and analytics to inform strategic technology decisions, reduce technical debt, and meet sustainability goals.
Source: Flexera
10. Vega Cloud
Vega Cloud is a platform that aims to maximize efficiency and minimize cloud spending by providing tools to connect, manage, and optimize multi-cloud IT environments. It adds a unified view for all spending associated with analytics, warehousing, and databases across all cloud providers, increasing transparency.
Key features include:
- Vega Inform: Offers visibility into cloud environments to see the big picture and make informed decisions.
- Vega Optimize: Provides actionable insights to implement cost-savings and optimize resource utilization.
- Vega Operate: Enables integration and continuous improvement of cloud operations, ensuring efficient management of cloud
- Enterprise agreement support: Assists in simplifying cloud provider negotiations and actively managing discounts to achieve cost savings.
Source: Vega Cloud
Conclusion
Cloud management platforms are essential for organizations striving to optimize their multi-cloud environments, ensuring cost efficiency, operational effectiveness, and compliance. With a range of solutions available, organizations must evaluate their priorities—such as cost visibility, automation, Kubernetes support, or integration capabilities—to select the tool that best aligns with their goals.





