Apptio Cloudability vs. Rackspace Fabric

I think if you are maybe small in your cloud spend and you're only in one cloud, I think you can probably get away with just using the cost management tool in that cloud vendor. I don't think it's necessary for everyone and I think you have to have enough optimizations to have your return on investment, but it's certainly suited if you plan to grow and you're still small, get it now and don't wait.

Incentivized

I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.

Incentivized

• In Analyzing the detailed analysis of the cloud costs usage specifically in terms of analyzing AWS CUR reports which consists of very huge files.
• In terms of offering the rich set of dimensions related to the resources across the clouds and sharing it to levels of personas
• It's good that APIs that allow integrations with other systems for data sharing and automation based on the organizational needs.
• Automation and policy enforcement especially in terms of activities like shutting down of the resources in the Non Business hours.

Incentivized

• Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
• Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
• Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
• Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.

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

• It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors
• I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while

Incentivized

If it were up to me, I would renew and dedicate additional resources to the product

Incentivized

Very strong tool, nearly as clunky as older tools like CloudCheckr and much more fully featured than newer tools like Pileus. It's easy to get started with drilling into data for experienced FinOps users; others end users have a learning curve, but I don't think that's specific to Apptio Cloudability. The biggest drawback I find is the tool is buggier than others (e.g. CloudHealth), and constantly having to refresh a browser makes for a poor user experience.

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

Very responsive, knowledgeable staff and quick resolutions to issues

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

Cloudability has more calculated fields for the CUR information, simplifying the reporting process. The performance of the tool for dashboarding and reporting is much faster as well as far more flexible. Being able to easily create reports and surface them to users with a few clicks provides much greater benefits over the dashboarding and reporting within CloudCheckr. CloudCheckr does have a more robust resource inventory reporting system with lots of services and data fields. Cloudy surfaces a great deal more opportunities for rightsizing than CloudCheckr too

Incentivized

I also used Monitis as a monitoring service for our server. Rackspace'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.

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

• I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need
• The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first
• I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring!

Incentivized