SOLUTION BRIEF Simplify Your Google Cloud Platform Environment with Complete Transparency

The Challenge

Using Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or another public cloud service provider, can help you realize the differentiation and flexibility your business needs to grow and innovate. However, whether you’re all in on GCP or adopting a multi-cloud strategy, you’ll face added complexity and the challenge created by a lack of visibility into cost and usage by each business group, team or cost center in your organization. Native cloud management tools offered by GCP or other homegrown tools might not overcome these hurdles, especially if your business uses multiple clouds (and sometimes in addition to your own data center). How do you get granular visibility into your GCP environment and efficiently manage costs as you scale?

CloudHealth Simplifies Your GCP Journey

CloudHealth® is the most trusted platform to help organizations optimize and govern their GCP or multi-cloud environments. With CloudHealth, you can get visibility into your GCP cost and usage data to make sense of what is happening in your environment. Using this data, you can optimize and gain control of your spend by taking advantage of tailored recommendations and implementing governance policies with automated actions. CloudHealth can be further integrated with your business to create an accountable and scalable cloud management practice that establishes proven frameworks as you progress through your cloud management maturity journey.

Granular Visibility with Relevant Business Context at Your Fingertips

Most businesses start gaining visibility into their cloud costs with the native tools provided by cloud service providers. But what happens when you need to understand those costs within the context of your business? It often requires considerable effort and time to fully understand how much was spent on compute resources for a specific application or line of business, or whether one of your engineering teams is spending more than necessary on resources it doesn’t fully utilize. You need the ability to accurately organize all the resources in your environment (even untaggable resources) into groups relevant to your business.
 

CloudHealth Perspectives allow you to create views based on groups of assets determined by their tags or other metadata, enabling you to more accurately track cloud consumption by the actual project, team or other relevant division in your business. After getting complete visibility into all your cloud costs, you can perform showback or chargeback, accurately reallocating costs to the business groups that incurred them. These cloud management capabilities are critical for driving accountability with developers and establishing a FinOps culture in your organization.

Optimize and Control Spend with Policies and Recommendations

Maintaining control of your environment as your business scales is a daunting task. A large, decentralized team of engineers with flexibility to develop applications using the resources they prefer opens the possibility for misalignment with company policies and industry standards. Building a centralized governance team, such as a cloud center of excellence (CCoE), is a great solution. CloudHealth delivers the tools that CCoE leaders need to set guidelines and flag wasteful or out-of-policy behavior. The CloudHealth policy engine does not require any coding, so any business user can create and manage policies without relying on limited coding resources. Policies enable you to set guardrails for your environment, and get alerted when cost and usage are out of compliance, helping you stay ahead of potential problems and fix them before they get out of control.

With visibility into your cloud costs and usage, you can more accurately understand what exactly your business needs to operate and how to efficiently meet those needs. CloudHealth rightsizing recommendations are built transparently on user-defined business goals. Users can create custom efficiency targets, so the recommendations align with your business’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Set performance thresholds that make sense for your business, and take advantage of advanced filtering capabilities and region visibility. If you have any consistency in your cloud usage month over month, it makes sense to purchase committed use discounts (CUDs) to cover that consistent usage and reduce its cost. CloudHealth can help you navigate the complexity of purchasing commitment-based discounts by providing historic and current cost and usage reporting.

A Single Platform to Manage all Your Clouds

With diverse needs across their businesses, many companies today use more than one public cloud. This presents an additional obstacle that native tools simply cannot address. CloudHealth supports all major public clouds, such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and VMware-based clouds. Our cross-cloud dashboards give you complete visibility into multi-cloud cost and usage history, allowing you to facilitate cloud financial management best practices across your organization, and track actual spend against your planned budgets. CloudHealth Perspectives can be used to enable you to track consumption by business context across multiple clouds.

Strengthen Your GCP Security Posture

CloudHealth Secure State™ is an intelligent cloud security and compliance monitoring platform that helps organizations reduce risk and protect millions of cloud resources by remediating security violations and scaling best practices at cloud speed. Learn more about mitigating security and compliance risks across public cloud and interconnected Kubernetes resources by trying CloudHealth Secure State for free.

Learn more

Ready to get started on your cloud management journey? Visit us online today and sign up for a free trial of the CloudHealth by VMware Suite™. 

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