Financial Insights with VMware Tanzu CloudHealth
By Rik Groenewoud
As Xebia Microsoft Managed Services we have implemented a new tool called VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (or just CloudHealth in short) to help us to get grip on the cloud spend of our customers. And you, as customers, also can use this tool to look at the trends and insights of your Azur You, as customers, can also use this tool to look at the trends and insights of your Azure costs any time you want! costs any time you want! In this article I will dive into the key features of this CloudHealth and show how it can benefit you directly.
The main feature of this tool is to have out-of-the-box reports on your Azure spend. Instead of using the Azure portal to combine different Cost Management reports and scopes to get an overview of your spend, in CloudHealth all costs are centralized to give you a true single-pane-of-glass experience.
After login, a dashboard directly shows a high-level overview of last month’s costs, costs of the current month and the forecast for the current month. If you want to dive deeper into the details of your spend, there are specific reports available with all kinds of filters and categories to inspect the costs data. There are specific reports for historical spend, current spend or reports that focus on specific resource types such as Storage Accounts or VMs.
Using filters, you can narrow down the data to, for example, a specific resource group, subscription, resource, or tag. If you created a report and want to use to more often, you can save it to make it be available under “Saved Reports” . Furthermore, you can export the data to .CSV or PNG and schedule the report to be sent to you by email.
Perspectives
One of the most powerful functionalities in CloudHealth is called “Perspectives” . With perspectives it is possible to create custom categories that can be used in the earlier mentioned dashboards and reports. For example, if you have several subscriptions that belong to a specific workload, you can create a perspective for this workload and add the subscriptions. This way you can easily see the costs of this workload in the dashboard and reports. Another example is to create a perspective for a specific department or cost center based on tagging.
In other words, perspectives are a way to group resources together based on your own criteria and be flexible in how you report on your cloud spend.
Recommendations and Governance
Reporting and insights on history and trends are valuable, but CloudHealth goes one step further and includes recommendations on savings based on the data that is collected. It detects unused resources, underutilized resources, rightsizing opportunities and more. Again, there are reports that show you these recommendations.
This also goes beyond spend alone and includes recommendations on security and governance by importing the Azure Security Center recommendations and Azure Policy recommendations.
Multi-Cloud
As we are a Microsoft first company, most of our customers use Azure as their preferred cloud provider. However, we also have customers that use other cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud. CloudHealth is a multi-cloud tool and can be used to get insights on costs and recommendations on savings for all these cloud providers. This makes it a unique opportunity to get a single-pane-of-glass on all your cloud spend and recommendations on savings.
If you want to know more or want to have access to CloudHealth, please contact me via rik.groenewoud@xebia.com
