At Boston’s brand new Encore hotel and casino, CloudLIVE 2019 attendees were greeted by a breathtaking lobby filled with seasonal mums and a carousel made of flowers. Daylight streaming in the glass ceiling light the way for them as they headed down the hallway for the first day—focused on Pre-Conference Training for attendees in the CloudHealth Platform.
The morning broke out into two tracks with both rooms completely full of engaged listeners. The first track, entitled CloudHealth Jumpstar, focused on platform basics, while the second track, Optimization and Cost Allocation with the CloudHealth Platform, dove deep on cost reduction––below is a quick summary of each.
CloudHealth Jumpstart
Session Speaker: Elly Grekin, Partner Training Program Manager, CloudHealth by VMware
Jumpstart was a hands-on session for those who are relatively new to the CloudHealth Platform. Focused on teaching users how to leverage the platform to analyze infrastructure and optimize their cloud. Some of the topics covered throughout the day were how to analyze your cost and usage, how to identify proper resource utilization and reservation management, as well as how to build policies for improved governance in your cloud environment. Running all day from 9 AM to 4 PM, with a break for lunch at noon, Elly Grekin kept the group on their toes. With both working sessions and instructor lead slides, Grekin made sure that everyone in the audience was getting the most out of their face-to-face time with a CloudHealth Trainer.
Be cautious of paralysis by analysis…while the CloudHealth Platform provides an incredible depth of data, if you don’t have the internal processes in place to take advantage of the data being shown to you—and analyze said data in context with your specific business objectives—then none of it matters. Take the time to act on these recommendations.
– Gregory Fusco, Technical Account Manager, CloudHealth by VMware
Optimization and Cost Allocation
Session Speaker, Part 1: Michelle Fowler, Technical Trainer; Wilson MacDonald, Consulting Architect; Greg Fusco, Technical Account Manager, CloudHealth by VMware
Session Speaker, Part 2: Shannon Jackson, Sr. Technical Trainer Specialist; Emily Wanless, Sr. Professional Services Consultant, CloudHealth by VMware
While the Jumpstart training session focused on getting new users comfortable with the CloudHealth platform, the Optimization and Cost Allocation training session was an opportunity for CloudHealth users to take a deeper dive into rightsizing, identifying wasted spend, and building policies to alert users of saving opportunities.
The morning session, led by Michelle Fowler and Wilson MacDonald, focused on how to gain greater insight into optimization opportunities surrounding compute, databases, storage, networking, and other services. This included exploring areas of high cost and how to analyze utilization metrics. One big takeaway for attendees? It’s important to provide context to the data your seeing in the CloudHealth Platform—and that starts with defining cloud metrics as they relate to your business objectives. For example, take time to set minimum and maximum utilization metrics, determine how much time should pass before a snapshot is considered ‘outdated’, and define what qualifies as an idle load balancer (i.e. the number of requests, over what time period, etc). These will be unique to your organization and are necessary to build policies that manage your environment based on your business needs.
After lunch, Shannon Jackson and Emily Wanless tackled part two of the Optimization and Cost Allocation training track, getting even more granular on cost analysis and trends with attendees, starting with identifying cost reallocation strategies, analyzing reports for deltas and trends, and building policies to aid in managing costs.
A third session started in the afternoon focused on CloudHealth APIs, a quick summary is below.
CloudHealth APIs
Session Speaker: Gil Reese, Technical Trainer, CloudHealth by VMware
Technical Trainer Gil Reese led CloudLIVE’s final training session focused on gaining insight into working with the CloudHealth APIs. Reese started with a high-level view of how to work with the CloudHealth APIs, then went in-depth on the fundamentals of accessing and customizing report data with APIs, how to use the perspective APIs to create and update perspective groupings, an introduction to next-gen Adhoc reporting APIs (currently in Beta), and more.
About the CloudHealth Training Program
Training on the CloudHealth Platform doesn’t need to end with today’s sessions. By visiting the CloudHealth training portal, you can access hands-on training for different lines of business, use cases, and cloud management expertise.
From Beginners to Experts: If you’re just getting started using the platform, the Onboarding Training program consists of hands-on courses designed to help you tailor the CloudHealth Platform for your organization. For experienced CloudHealth users, we highly recommend the Expansion Training program to build on the skills you’ve acquired to become a power user in your organization (you can even achieve your CloudHealth Certification).
Role-based Learning: Anyone tasked with managing the cloud understands the challenges of building and sustaining a team of users. To mitigate these challenges, we recommend role-based training as the most efficient way to enable CloudHealth user success in your organization. CloudHealth’s role-based training services include the Core Team training, for those who will be administering CloudHealth, as well as two types of Business User learning paths, those that focus on Finance activities (known as “power users”) and those who align with DevOps activities. The role-based training works through the lifecycle of how you would use CloudHealth to perform daily tasks. Role-based learning paths contain a series of courses that are delivered virtually as instructor-led sessions that include hands-on activities. To learn more click here.
Check out the CloudLIVE website for keynote session recaps and announcements made througout the event!
