Spot by NetApp, now including CloudCheckr, helps companies to run their cloud investments. The Spot product suite uses machine learning and analytics to automate and optimize cloud infrastructure, to ensure that workloads and applications always have the best possible infrastructure that is available, scalable and available at the lowest possible cost. Spot’s technology provides insights into cloud costs, recommendations for how to optimize utilization and costs, and automation to implement…
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ServiceNow IT Operations Management
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Built on the Now Platform, the ServiceNow IT Operations Management bundle is designed to help users gain visibility across infrastructure and apps, maintain service health, and optimize cloud delivery and spend.
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.
We have taken advantage of the single platform for different IT disciplines over the past few years and now we are doing more and more with the integrations. Our teams are looking at the same information which stops the blame game a lot. Their newest AIOps has been a very nice surprise as we've tried another tool for about 2 years and it required us to hire outside consultants to try and build what we needed. So far, ServiceNow found a lot of things we didn't know to look for. It's not perfect in fixing everything, but really has provided a lot of visibility and troubleshooting.
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.
The centralized dashboard allows us to keep track of production incidents as they come in, and allow us to view and sort them based on severity, making sure it's tracked
The read/edit access and role granting process is straightforward, meaning that only the right people can change /update the statuses of incidents without unintended consequences
With AI driven classification, it's easy to track outage impacts
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.
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.
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.
BMC was our legacy system before deploying ServiceNow. It's time had passed for us as it couldn't really keep up with our move to cloud and the number of services we were using. The cost kept getting higher, especially with all of the customization we had to do. Over the years, just got unwieldy. We still use Splunk for raw data and log analysis, but we upgraded to ServiceNow event management and the Loom system log analytics. We had Loom before ServiceNow bought them, but it's nice it's all on one platform for us. Splunk at times had so much info, we didn't know where to start, but ServiceNow gives us a great starting point.
