Item: IBM Cloudability
Rating: 7
Author: Dustin Mullenix

Overall Satisfaction with Apptio Cloudability

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use it for reporting on AWS costs by product, service and team, and for analysis and investigation of anomalies. I also use it as a health dashboard for our AWS spend, meaning that I check my personalized dashboard every day. It has a variety of widgets that compare current trends with historical patterns as a way of identifying anomalous patterns or confirming expected changes. Finally, I configure dashboards for individual Engineering and Data Operations teams so that they can stay aware of the cost impact of their consumption.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Enriching tags with additional data sources
Allowing for multi-year analysis
Analysis of achieved savings through various discount programs

Cons

It's slower than AWS Cost Explorer
The conditional filters require too many clicks to use
I don't trust the resource utilization data on the cost widgets. When I've looked at it, which has been sparingly, the data makes no sense for our environment.

Return on Investment

Faster identification of spend anomalies
Enables reporting on the impact of discount vehicles, such as Reserved Instances and SPOT servers
Enables in-depth analysis by retaining years of AWS invoice data

Usability

It's a solid reporting tool, and the Business Metric (tag enrichment) functionality adds a lot of value. The dashboards are useful for keeping teams informed. It needs to improve utilization data in widgets and allow for the user-friendly creation of custom metrics.

Apptio Portfolio Solution

ApptioOne

We do not use others.

Alternatives Considered

Flexera Cloud Management Platform (RightScale), CloudHealth by VMware and CloudZero

Flexera and CloudHealth both seem to offer more in terms of optimization recommendations. CloudZero has the promise of correlating engineering events to cost outcomes, which is a really powerful capability for engineers. I would rank Cloudability in the same class as Flexera and CloudHealth, and CloudZero, which I only know from demos, seems a step up from these.

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Cloudability delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Cloudability's feature set?

Did IBM Cloudability live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Cloudability go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy IBM Cloudability again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Atlassian Confluence, Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft), Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

It's better than native tools if you use multiple clouds. It's good for reporting, especially allowing for enriching data by adding other data sets to resource tags. It has a wide variety of graphics for widgets. It is easy to administer, which grows in importance as your user base grows. If you want a tool that excels at providing optimization recommendations, I think you will be disappointed. Also, if you want to driver-based forecasting, as opposed to forecasting based solely on historical trends, it is no help. I can't figure out how to create custom metrics, so it's limited in terms of calculating unit economics. Also, they should have a one-click way to get a report into Google Sheets, like Jira does. It would save me several steps every time I need to export a report into CSV for analysis.

Comments

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Lauren Rappold
(Vendor Representative) commented 3 years ago
Thank you so much for your review, Dustin! We really appreciate you taking the time out to share your feedback and experience with Apptio Cloudability with us.

A Solid Legacy Product That Needs to Innovate to Keep Up With Next-Gen Platforms

Modules Used