VMware Aria Cost vs. NetApp Spot

​As more organizations move their workloads to the public cloud, managing costs can become a significant challenge. I am seeing more and more customers moving to the hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud models. This brings its own challenges and costs is a top concern. I've been working with a customer to compare these two options and thought I would share my thoughts and understanding of these two popular cost optimization solutions: VMware Aria Cost and NetApp Spot. I will explore the benefits of each solution and help you determine which one might be better suited to your needs.

What is VMware Aria Cost (Powered by CloudHealth)?

​VMware Aria Cost is a cloud cost management solution that helps organizations monitor and optimize their cloud spend. The solution provides a comprehensive view of cloud costs across multiple clouds and accounts, assisting organizations in identifying and reducing unnecessary spending. This is very powerful in that you can tie in one or multiple public clouds to gain visibility. 

VMware Aria Cost helps organizations to:

• Monitor cloud costs: The solution provides real-time visibility into cloud spending, enabling organizations to monitor costs and usage across multiple clouds and accounts.
• Optimize spending: VMware Aria Cost helps organizations to identify and eliminate wasted spending, optimize resource utilization, and reduce costs.
• Manage budgets: The solution provides budget tracking and alerts to help organizations stay within budget constraints.

VMware Aria Key Capabilities

• Resource & Organization Management: VMware Aria Cost FlexOrgs helps align cloud data with business needs, providing greater control over user access, sharing, and delegation across different levels of an organization. The platform can be fine-tuned by dynamically allocating assets to business groups, known as VMware Aria Cost Perspectives, and provides tools to analyze and oversee cloud environments based on various categories, such as project, application, and cost center, to encourage accountability for costs and usage.
• Reporting & Dashboards: VMware Aria Cost FlexReports allows for custom filtering and refinement of reports to analyze datasets relevant to business objectives. Custom dashboards can be created across clouds, and detailed reports can be built from scratch to perform granular analysis on cost, usage, and asset data using various dimensions.
• Budget Management & Forecasting: VMware Aria allows users to set up budgets that can be used to compare expected costs to actual spend throughout the year. Multiple budgets can be created and customized according to the company's fiscal year. VMware Aria also offers forecasting capabilities that use historical data to predict future values within a given time frame, and can alert stakeholders when costs are forecasted to exceed budget.

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