Welcome to the first in the Cloud Management Professional Services blog series dedicated to all things CloudHealth®! In this series we will cover topics like what is CloudHealth, how it can help you manage your multi-cloud environment, the most common use cases, and the benefits of integrating with on-premises and multi-cloud environments. In this blog we will discuss the Fundamentals of CloudHealth and how it and VMware Professional Services can help your organization on its multi-cloud journey.
Is your organization finding it increasingly difficult to manage on-premises and public cloud environments?
Organizations today often face a huge disconnect in what they expected when they first started their multi-cloud journey. First, they discover the challenges of visualizing and reporting usage across different cloud providers. Then they realize that reporting by logical business groups (e.g., line of business or application) is almost impossible to manage, especially when leveraging multiple cloud providers. This leads to unpredictable cloud spend and challenges with ensuring each line of business gets allocated its share of the IT budget. On top of that, some organizations encounter decreased agility, higher costs and higher risks in leveraging the public, hybrid, and multi-cloud solutions for their workloads. CloudHealth provides organizations with capabilities to solve all these issues and challenges.
What is CloudHealth?
CloudHealth acts as a single pane of glass, aggregating data from leading cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and VMware Cloud on AWS (beta). CloudHealth then allows for that data to be reported and analyzed across any logical business group known as a CloudHealth Perspective, such as a line of business or application.
Users can also view on-demand cost summaries to see their current costs, how it compares to the previous month, as well as projected costs.
How does CloudHealth manage cloud spend?
This is great, but how does CloudHealth actually help with managing an organization’s cloud spend? Once business leaders have visibility into cloud spend, they can leverage different CloudHealth reports for better consumption tracking and budget management across multiple categories, including line of businesses. This helps application owners and cost centers better plan for future spend and drives budget accountability.
Data aggregation also allows users to get actionable recommendations on ways to optimize costs across their infrastructure. As seen below, CloudHealth makes cost savings recommendations based on historical usage.
CloudHealth also makes recommendations for rightsizing machines to further deliver cost savings on machines that may be underutilized or not utilized at all. In addition, leveraging cost reporting allows financial and procurement teams to have accurate and historical data for rate negotiations with cloud providers.
How does it help organizations control spend?
Many of an organization’s processes and management tasks in the cloud are manual, leading to errors or misses in governances and policies. CloudHealth leverages Perspectives and policies to implement tighter governance within the organization.
Reports can then highlight potential security risks allowing for a proactive instead of reactive approach in a multi-cloud environment.
What about on-premises infrastructure?
CloudHealth not only aggregates and reports data across multiple hypervisors, but it also can connect with an organization’s on-premises data center, as well. Leveraging a bi-directional integration, VMware vRealize® Operations™ provides administrators with even more visibility into their infrastructure.
As seen above, this integration provides users with data about both on-premises costs within CloudHealth as well as public cloud costs within vRealize Operations!
How can VMware Professional Services help?
To get value from your CloudHealth investments faster and realize the multi-cloud benefits, including increased agility, scalability and speed of service delivery for new products and innovative services, VMware Professional Services can help! Our team has a range of services to help get you started with gaining visibility into managing your multi-cloud environments and cloud costs:
- Leverage best practices to design, plan and configure the CloudHealth platform
- Identify and prioritize key actions and recommendations to optimize costs, boost performance and improve governance
- Identify and define key reporting and Perspectives
- Allow for single percentage discounts for simple billing and unique rules for complex billing
If you would like to learn more about VMware’s Professional Services for CloudHealth, check out the Implementation Services, Governance Services and Optimization Services. For additional information on the CloudHealth suite of products, check out additional information here!
