CloudCheckr vs. Kaminario K2 (discontinued)

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

K2 works well in our mixed-use virtual environment. I would not hesitate to place any workload on K2, it has always performed well. We use fiber-channel connectivity as it replaced our large legacy storage array, replacing one rack of spinning disks with 4U of flash.

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

• Great performance
• Great support
• Super-simple to use

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

• Not well known, so third-party support is lacking
• Data reduction is good, but not as good as expected (actual 2.7:1)

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

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

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

We performed a bake-off with K2 and one other vendor and they performed identically. K2 pricing was aggressive, performance was great, and it offered the features that we needed at a price that we could afford

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

• Installing K2 reduced runtime of one of our batch processes, freeing up one employee for other tasks.
• Less time managing storage.

Incentivized