As announced at FinOps X in June, VMware Tanzu CloudHealth has been working on one of the most significant updates to the platform in its history – an enhanced and modernized experience for our users. Since then, we have shared more details about how this new experience is designed with FinOps practitioners in mind and can power FinOps practices through the Inform, Optimize, and Operate phases throughout the FinOps Framework.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that the new CloudHealth experience will be available as an open beta to CloudHealth customers. Interested customers can reach out to their account teams to get access and begin exploring this reimagined version of CloudHealth, enjoying intuitively designed navigation, multi-cloud and FOCUS-oriented features, and Generative AI-powered capabilities with Intelligent Assist.
The open beta includes all of the capabilities unveiled during our Tech Preview phase, making it easier for FinOps and Cloud Operations teams to collaborate, effectively govern and optimize multi-cloud environments, and successfully implement FinOps practices across their organization. Some highlights are listed below:
- Intelligent Assist – a large language model-enabled chatbot that allows users to gain insights about their clouds and services through natural language, such as granular custom reports or recommendations specific to their cloud usage
- Cloud Smart Summary – a concise summary of what is driving your cloud spend, why it changes over time, and Generative AI-assisted suggestions to optimize your costs
- Optimization Dashboard – a single, customizable pane that brings together all available commitment discount recommendations, rightsizing opportunities, anomalous spending, and potential savings across your clouds and services
- Realized Savings – detailed reporting and analysis alongside key performance indicators that quantifies savings realized over a desired timeframe in your multi-cloud environment
With the open beta, we’re excited to share additional capabilities available to customers today. When combined with what is already available in the new CloudHealth user experience, these additional capabilities ensure that users not only get the most out of the platform, but can truly make it their own and align it with the information and activities most critical to their business.
Custom Widgets and Dashboards
The new CloudHealth experience provides robust personalization opportunities with custom widgets and dashboards.It includes a library of widgets that can be chosen to display information on your cloud usage and costs – such as active anomalies, potential cost savings, and effective savings rate. Widgets can be easily dragged and arranged into dashboards based on a user’s preference or designed specific persona. Available widgets span the capabilities of the new experience, providing FinOps practitioners with a tailored view of their multi-cloud environment with shortcuts to the tools they need most for their role.
In addition to the widgets that are already available natively, users have the ability to create and save custom reports as widgets for the first time. With saved reports as widgets in their custom dashboards, users can take full advantage of the customization offered in the new CloudHealth experience by including any metric or report they desire in a dashboard – and can do so in any flexible layout they choose.
Content Sharing
As a step beyond custom widgets and dashboards, the new CloudHealth experience also introduces the ability to pass down saved dashboards and widgets throughout a CloudHealth FlexOrgs hierarchy – sharing user-created content from a top-level organizational unit down through selected sub-organizational units. FinOps practitioners can select content that they would like to pass to specific sub-orgs, removing the need to rebuild custom dashboards and widgets. Content designed for specific business units or users can now be made accessible much more easily and conveniently, without having to re-create what has already been designed.
Unified Reporting
Building reports has become much easier in the new CloudHealth experience. Unified Reporting reduces the learning curve of creating custom and complex reports on an organization’s cloud costs and usage. Authoring a custom report does not require any technical expertise or knowledge of query languages such as SQL, and it can be done quickly by any platform user or FinOps team member. Additionally, the new experience gives users the ability to easily create Calculated Columns, or report columns that combine fields into a sum value based on a user’s selections.
Using the Graph
Another integral part of the new CloudHealth experience is the Graph, which powers the platform under the hood. The Graph provides users with a powerful tool to navigate through asset information, track relationships between resources, and create policy-like search queries for resources. Queries can be written in the search bar with query auto-complete assistance, as well as through the CloudHealth Generative-AI chatbot, Intelligent Assist. Using the Graph allows users to query their data and implement best practices for optimization and governance as defined by the FinOps Foundation.
To illustrate the power of the Graph, the above example shows a few of saved Graph queries, including a query to detect all idle Azure Virtual Machines. The bottom half of the image is the results of our idle Virtual Machine query, which shows a single idle VM. More importantly, because of the capabilities provided by the Graph we are able to see all of the additional resources that have relationships with this idle VM. In this case, our Idle VM has relationships with a Resource Group, NIC, Disk, and 2 VM Extensions. This additional visibility enables users to truly understand the impact of something like a single idle VM through its associated resources and the effects that may result from any actions taken.
What’s Next?
If you’re at FinOps X Europe in Barcelona this week, make sure to come by our booth in the Expo to see the new CloudHealth user experience for yourself! Our team will be onsite and is eager to answer your questions or show you a demo.
If you are a current customer that would like to access the new experience open beta, reach out to your account team today for more information. Access will be available to CloudHealth partners at a later date.
