Product Customers Learn Company Sign in Sign up Contact us

Comparison Guide

Harness VS
CloudHealth
Cloud Cost by VMware
Management
 Cloud Cost CloudHealth by
Management VMware
Harness Cloud Cost Management simplifies and automates CloudHealth by VMware delivers intelligent insights that help you
the features FinOps, CloudOps, and Engineering teams need optimize costs, improve governance, and strengthen your cloud

to take control of cloud spend. security posture.

Company size Company size

500-1000 37,000
Founded Founded

2016 2012
Funding Funding

$425M Acquired by VMware (2018)

CloudHealth was acquired by VMware in 2018. VMware is

Harness is categorized as: currently under acquisition by chip maker Broadcom. “CloudHealth

Continuous Integration by VMware” is being rebranded as “VMware Aria Cost powered by

Continuous Delivery CloudHealth”

Cloud Cost Management

Acquired
Cloud Cost Optimization Acquired
Feature Flags
Service Reliability Management CloudHealth is categorized as:
Security Testing Orchestration Cloud Cost Management
Chaos Engineering
Software Engineering Insights

Free Trial

What is the difference

between Harness Cloud Cost
Management vs. CloudHealth
by VMware?
 CloudHealth by VMware was built for business intelligence, but it is complex, and lacks the deep Kubernetes
support or any of the advanced automated cloud cost savings features found in Harness Cloud Cost
Management.

UPDATED November 30, 2023

Features Harness CCM CloudHealth by VMware

Solution

Deployment Option SaaS and Self-Hosted SaaS

Multi-Cloud Support AWS, Azure and GCP AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud

On-Prem Cost Monitoring

Kubernetes Only

Pricing Model Percentage Cloud Spend Percentage Cloud Spend

Cost Visibility

Cost Perspectives / Chargeback /

Showback
Cost Categories / Dynamic Bucketing

Kubernetes Cost Allocation (By Node/

Cluster/Workload)

Multi-Cloud Cost Visualizations

Import 3rd Party Costs Coming Soon

Out-of-the-Box Dashboards

Custom BI Dashboards

Forecasting

Cloud Inventory

Cost Optimization

Anomaly Detection

Automated Idle Resource

Manual Schedule
Management
Spot Orchestration

Cluster Orchestration on Spot

Instances

Kubernetes Node-Pool
Recommendations

Kubernetes Workload
Recommendations

AWS Compute Recommendations

Azure Compute Recommendations

GCP Compute Recommendations

RI / SP Planning and
Recommendations

Automated RI / SP Contract Execution

Cost Governance
Out-of-the-Box Governance Policy
Rules

Automated Governance Rule

Enforcement

AI Assisted Governance Rule Creation

Budgets

Alerts

Reporting

Administrative

Multi-Currency Support

MSP Margin Adjustments

Role-based Access Control

Full Audit Trails

 APIs Available

24/7 Support Available

Training

Documentation

Summary:
CloudHealth by VMware provides a great set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for cloud providers, provided that you can dedicate the staff
required to manage the complex reporting required. While they may have been one of the early innovators in cloud cost management, they’ve
stagnated in new feature development since their acquisition by VMware (and are expected to stagnate further if the pending Broadcom
acquisition is approved). The tool is difficult to implement, and engineering teams simply won’t use it.

If you are looking for a tool that your engineers will actually use, that gives deep insights into all your multi-cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure,
and provides innovative, automated features that create new cloud cost savings opportunities, then Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear
winner. Harness gives your FinOps teams the tools they need to accelerate cost savings, and maintain the most optimized cloud spend over time.

Cost Reporting:
Understanding cloud costs is the first fundamental for gaining control of your cloud spend. Without accurate and timely reporting, as well as
continuous cost monitoring, your cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control.
For those with a PhD in analytics and reporting, CloudHealth by VMware is an amazing tool that provides a wealth of information on cloud costs.
For the rest of their users, it is a very difficult tool to learn and understand, requiring extensive training to be able to create usable reports based
on custom queries. This has led their customers to designate one or two people in finance to create and maintain weekly/monthly cost reports.
Otherwise, no one else in the organization is using the tool, including the engineers tasked with chasing down cloud cost anomalies and
implementing recommendations. “We just weren’t using it” is the most common reason customers are moving away from CloudHealth by VMware.

Harness CCM gives you easy to use, easy to understand reports and dashboards out of the box, with an intuitive interface that you can easily
customize to suit the needs of your organization. FinOps, DevOps and Engineering teams can get real time visibility into cloud costs, budget
status and cost anomaly alerts to keep them on top of their cloud spend.

Cost Anomaly Monitoring:

Engineering is always innovating on new features that drive your business revenue, but what happens when they forget to turn off that expensive
test cluster, and no one notices? End of month bill shock, an unpleasant experience for everyone when your cloud bill is tens of thousands of
dollars over budget. Continuous cost anomaly reporting is critical to preventing out of control cloud spend.

Harness CCM provides continuous cost anomaly monitoring, using AI to detect unexpected changes in your cloud spend. Not just big cost
anomalies, either. Harness CCM surfaces smaller cost changes that overtime add up to much larger bills. When anomalies are detected, users are
alerted immediately, with detailed information on where the anomaly is occurring so that root cause analysis can be performed.

For such a fundamental feature for keeping cloud costs under control, CloudHealth by VMware has not made releasing this a priority. Cost
anomaly detection is in beta now, has been in beta for months, and is expected to still be in beta for months. This is simply unacceptable for any
fiscally responsible organization to be forced to manually review periodic cost reports to surface cost anomalies, days or weeks after they’ve
begun.

Kubernetes Support:
The cloud-native computing world is built on Kubernetes, so having deep insights into your Kubernetes costs and how to optimize those costs is