Author: Md. Afzal Hassan Ehsani

VMware’s Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth is an enterprise cloud financial management platform with added cloud management features, like security and governance.

The CloudHealth platform ingests massive amounts of data from multiple sources and integrations. It then aggregates the data in one place, enabling simpler analysis and quicker decision-making. This helps IT staff to visualize, analyze, and act on their environment’s resource usage, application/infrastructure performance, security, and compliance aspects.

CloudHealth main features: Why is CloudHealth so popular?

CloudHealth main capabilities revolve around helping FinOps, DevOps, and DevSecOps teams discover and continuously monitor their cloud or on-premises environments. Here’s more:

Cloud financial management

CloudHealth offers several cloud cost management features to consider:

Visualize your cloud costs and usage
Supports chargebacks and showbacks by department, team, project or application
Create custom budgets and track your spending against them
Manage commitment based discounts, such as Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans, through amortization, purchase modeling, and optimizations
Get custom rightsizing recommendations you can implement manually
Includes budgeting and forecasting support with cost anomaly detection and alerts
Create custom policies to automate cost control
Facilitate collaborate in cloud cost management from a single place

Check this out:

Cloud governance with Cloud Operations

Cloud Operations enables you to create custom policies to automate cost management, security concerns, and more. It works for public, private, hybrid cloud, and multicloud deployments — as well as containerized environments.

The tool enables you to contrast performance data with your provisioned capacity to pinpoint assets that you could scale down or terminate to reduce unnecessary spending.

You’ll get alerts when conditions diverge from your desired state. Fortunately, your custom policies can kick in immediately and start enabling automated actions that execute changes in your environment.

Compliance and security management:

The platform supports real-time anomaly detection and leverages automation and machine learning to catch security concerns. For example, VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds detects misalignments, lateral resource relationships, entitlements, and more. Check this out:

VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth pros

Works for cloud and on-premises deployments
Supports hybrid cloud and multi-cloud cloud cost monitoring and management
Automates some cloud operations
Supports security monitoring and management within one platform

VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth cons

Ideal for enterprises looking for traditional cloud cost management features; not suitable for smaller organizations
Limits granularity to just department, project, team, and application
Doesn’t automatically implement risghtsizing recommendations