IBM Cloudability vs. Spot by NetApp

Good tool to start FinOps journey in a medium sized (or above) company. Currently missing AI capabilities that are now available with a lot of FinOps vendors in the market. Also, apptio currently does not have FOCUS dataset nomenclature, that can be worked upon.

Incentivized

CloudCheckr is fantastic for those that are purely in the Cloud as it provides everything you need under one roof for a comprehensive configuration and usage monitoring tool. It has SysLog capabilities though so you can farm out the alerts into a SIEM or other log management system, so hybrid environments could also benefit from its use.

Incentivized

• It shows the visibility into the cost and a single pane of glass for all of our cloud providers, multiple products in those multi-cloud. So it shows us our spending across the cloud by vendor, by product, and by all the tags that we have in the cloud. So it gives us visibility into many different directions in our cost.

Incentivized

• Detailed Best Practices. It's important to align your cloud to industry best practices for security and cost—it just performs better if it's used the way it's meant to be used. AWS is very flexible, and that's great when you have special requirements, but you've got to at least know when you're using something in a non-standard way so you can think through the implications.
• Cost Reduction. Some recommendations are almost impossible to make at least for our setup, but many, many others are easy. We only have to log into CloudCheckr every few months and make a few changes for it to more than pay for itself.
• Right-Sizing. This is related to the other points, but for some reason is separate from their cost module. The metrics it's able to pull only tell half the story, so it's good to verify it's sizing recommendations before making changes. But it does show you what instances to focus on first, and even if you choose a slightly different size to move it to, it does clearly indicate it's current size isn't appropriate. And this works both ways, if the size is too big, you can save some cash by making it smaller, but if it's too small, you want to be sure to scale up before you run into performance problems.

Incentivized

• There is currently no ability to apply global filters over the data in cloudability. Rather users must go through a difficult process to create custom views which they are later able to apply over top of their datasets.
• Drill functionality does not really exists but appears to be more of an after though add-on. Yes you are able to "drill" but the visuals disappear and even the ability to export the more detailed information.

Incentivized

• CloudCheckr features have a tendency to break without warning. Functionality in place for months could suddenly stop working.
• CloudCheckr support often delays work on support tickets for fixing broken application functionality.
• The CloudCheckr platform and documentation website often crash or experience performance degradation.
• CloudCheckr cost reporting is often impacted by faulty code or broken report functionality. This can contribute to a low level of confidence in CloudCheckr's ability to deliver accurate cost reporting.

Incentivized

We decided to build our own home-grown FinOps tool, but the results of the proof of concept were very promising.

Incentivized

I gave the IBM Cloudability a 7/10 because it is good, but it could improve in some places. It is easy to get data uploaded and ready to view, but it is only up to a certain point in time, and not live data. As for how it looks, the interface is good for viewing, however navigation could be a little better, maybe supported with a roadmap.

Incentivized

Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.

Incentivized

Only been 1 or 2 occaisions when not available, in 3 years

Incentivized

Afternoons tend to be a little slower, due to US traffic I assume

Incentivized

While there have been few support cases where the experience was good. But in multiple support cases it's firstly delayed and even after weeks or months of time, team is not able to provide us with the RCA of the issue. All they are claiming is the issue is now fixed which I still see coming back after few days or weeks as we've never identified and addressed the root cause.

Incentivized

Fantastic Support team who are responsive and address question and concerns promptly with a thorough explanation and fast resolution.

Incentivized

Training was adequate, but the real learning begins when you start using the product, like most things. All major functions were covered so as an entry point, was a good introduction to the product. The training pace was good as well, the areas were covered in decent depth, without being too much of an information overload.

Incentivized

Within months

Before Apptio we extensively used the cloud native and in house automated and developed cost optimization tool using python , powershell and leveraging the various cloud native services like AWS systems manager , Azure Functions and Azure automation run books.

Incentivized

There are a few products out there that'll do an aspect or two of what CloudCheckr does, but I honestly couldn't find anything nearly as comprehensive as CloudCheckr.

Incentivized

I wasn't personally involved, but all dealings with Apptio have been easy

Incentivized

Works as designed

Incentivized

• Positive - as our utilization of Cloud platforms has increased, getting better reporting has been a key objective and Cloudability has allowed us to achieve this.
• Positive - has allowed us to find opportunities for Cloud savings and improve our utilization of Cloud resources.

Incentivized

• CloudCheckr has allowed us to increase resell margins as an MSP.
• CloudCheckr has made us aware of cost savings opportunities that exceed the price of the platform itself.
• CloudCheckr has given us additional visibility that has allowed us to manage and understand cloud computing costs.

Incentivized