Yesterday’s article tried to set the scene and discuss why I think CloudHealth is such a great product, today’s article will be about 3 features that caught my eye that I’ve found to be pretty cool.
Policies
In the adapted words of Beyonce…. “Who Run the Cloud… Policies!!”
Policies should be used to run the cloud infrastructure where your workloads reside. But in order for policies to be effective you need an understanding of your cloud workloads, how their components work together and also a policy management system that makes it easy to define and configure policies according to different rulesets and actions. Policies can be configured to control costs, optimise performance, and enhance security and compliance – think of them as you cloud platform rule book!
CloudHealth allows you to automate your cloud policy management – this means the platform will continuously monitor your workloads to ensure they stay in compliance with any policies you set, and when it discovers a workload has violated a policy it can remediate following a set of pre-defined actions. In any environment, IT admins spend a lot of their time on BAU and keeping the lights on. Being able to use automation means you can spend less time monitoring and managing your environment and more time focusing on more business-critical issues or new innovative projects.
When an event occurs that triggers a policy, the CloudHealth policy management system can be configured to apply a number of different actions to suit the circumstances of the policy triggered, such as:
- Send a notification to the Cloud Admin if the projected monthly spend is going to be greater than 100% of the budget allocated.
- Take a snapshot and delete a block storage volume if it’s been unattached for a week.
- Monitor workload utilisation and expand resources if the workload is underprovisioned.
- Archive and delete virtual machines that have been idle for a month.
- Stop workloads being deployed if the user has consumed their monthly allocation of resources.
- And so on….
Policies and actions help to automate the governance of your cloud environment! If policies are the rule book, think of CloudHealth as Judge, Jury and Executioner!! =P
Perspectives
Within CloudHealth, “Perspectives” is a great way for the end user to view and group cloud components together in order to align them with a business objective – for example grouping workloads across multiple cloud instances to a line of business, or to a user, or to a specific type of cloud instance (say an EC2 instance), in fact you can tag components in AWS and use them to help build Perspectives.
Perspectives enable precision reporting, showing you unique ‘point-of-views’ to your cloud environment for the given group. They are rule-based, allowing you to report from both an operational (e.g. applications, roles) and a business standpoint (e.g. departments, product lines). Best of all you can create dynamic groups that automatically update as changes occur!
The platform will allow line of businesses to visualise and analyse infrastructure assets and services, and the corresponding data in ways that are most meaningful to them. As a result, they can fully understand what’s happening in their infrastructures, pinpoint the root causes of issues, and mitigate risks to optimise infrastructure performance, availability, and security
Reporting
And that leads me straight into Reporting! Perspectives are used throughout the CloudHealth platform to help build out dashboard views and reports – and there are vast amounts of dashboard views that look into consumption or cost trends. Each view typically allows you to drill down into individual users or virtual machines or lines of business!
The Cross-Cloud Cost dashboard is a very useful reporting tool for customers who run multiple clouds, showing on one single page what the cost and consumption are like, and even showing you cost history by owner – which means you can quickly identify which users are racking up those huge cloud bills!
One of the features I really like on CloudHealth is the simple Health Check report than can be generated after 24hrs of collecting metrics – reporting on cost consumption and possible optimisation scenarios with potential cost savings (for example reclaiming under-utilised instances or unused storage volumes). There’s also a recommendation on Reservation Management – determining how much could be saved using Reserved Instances rather than PAYG pricing and the ROI that can be achieved.
Another interesting tool is the Reserved Instances Optimizer which can offer recommendations on cost saving opportunities by analysing the utilisation across the whole cloud environment and then determine the optimum buy point for RIs (assuming you have unlimited budget). However, if you don’t have unlimited budget to buy a huge chunk of RIs up front, then you can set your budget using the slide bar and re-run the optimizer tool which will then work out the best assets to place into the RI given your budget, and the potential cost savings and ROI in doing so!
Optimizer also allows you to filter the report to only the assets you care about – for example the recommendations with regards to your production environment.
Conclusion
CloudHealth is a great tool that allows organisations the capability to gain insights into their cloud costs and manage the utilisation of cloud resources. In addition it grants organisations the ability to address security issues of cloud workloads and align a set of corporate policies across multi-cloud workloads to ensure compliancy. It also allows organisations the flexibility of determining how data is analysed, organised and reported by using Perspectives – correlating data with business goals to aid decision making. Finally, CloudHealth offers the ability to automate workflows by creating custom policies and guidelines that define how automated actions and tasks are executed.
If you want to find out more information on CloudHealth and its additional features and functions, then head along to their website or get in touch with your VMware Account Manager!
The Virtual Unknown 