Harness Cloud Cost Management vs Azure Cost Management

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management Vs. Azure Cost Management

Cloud Support:

The name would suggest that Azure Cost Management would only work Azure, right? Especially since AWS Cost Explorer only works for the AWS cloud. Surprisingly, that’s not the case! Azure Cost Management can also be integrated into the AWS cloud with PowerBI and Cloudyn, giving you more visibility than just the Cost Explorer tool would. However, Azure Cost Management still lacks vital features that Harness Cloud Cost Management provides out of the box – including support for all major cloud providers and unparalleled support for Kubernetes. We encourage you to explore our platform and see what you might miss out on.

Tag Management Required:

Tags aren’t mandatory in Azure Cost Management, in the sense that it can function without them, but you’ll end up with a whole lot of untagged resources and no proper way to assess where costs came from. For granular visibility, it is important to create, apply, and maintain good tagging policies. Harness can leverage existing tags, but minimizes the pain of tagging, providing visibility into application, service, environment, cluster, namespace, and workload with no tagging required.

Hybrid Cloud Visibility:

Azure Cost Management provides insights into the Azure and AWS clouds, making it a viable option for hybrid cloud visibility by servicing two of the big three cloud providers. However, this product still leaves Google Cloud Platform users in the lurch. Meanwhile, Harness provides coverage for Azure, AWS, and GCP as well. For any workloads running in Kubernetes, Harness provides visibility regardless of where the resources come from.

Visibility:

This granularity of visibility cannot be achieved in Azure Cost Management without tags, as we saw in the video linked above. Without tagging, you’ll only have access to service-level data when it comes to costs. Additionally, what happens if you have application, microservice, or environment costs that are outside of Azure or AWS? Azure Cost Management would not be able to provide insight, as it only works within the Azure and AWS clouds. Harness, however, provides this visibility without requiring tagging – on all major cloud providers and Kubernetes.

Cluster Visibility (Kubernetes/ECS):

Azure Cost Management is only able to provide insights into AKS, the service built specifically for Kubernetes. If you run your cloud workloads using Kubernetes as your tool of choice, Azure Cost Management will not be the right tool for you. Harness truly shines in Kubernetes cost management and provides valuable visibility that other tools often fail to offer.

Root Cost Analysis (3 Metrics):

Azure Cost Management provides no information whatsoever on idle, unallocated, and utilized costs within Kubernetes. Because these are crucial to understand resource efficiency in Kubernetes, Harness surfaces this information out of the box.

Cloud Event Correlation:

To correlate feature releases or engineering deployments with changes in cloud costs, a cloud cost management tool needs to have context behind an organization’s Continuous Delivery pipelines. Azure Cost Management, while integrated with the Azure and AWS clouds, has no way of getting this context. Harness ties right into a customer’s pipelines to make the correlation between deployments and cost changes.

Cost Recommendations:

Harness focuses on providing cost optimization recommendations for Kubernetes workloads. This allows customers to simply use existing resources in more efficient ways – no need to validate purchase, downsizing, and rightsizing recommendations that change the composition of the infrastructure. Where Azure Cost Management is different is that it does not provide these recommendations for Kubernetes. Instead, Azure Cost Management will surface optimization opportunities for your resources for free, which, when paired with the capabilities Harness has for Kubernetes, actually can result in fully-optimized infrastructure.

Anomaly Detection:

Harness provides the ability for customers to automatically flag and drill down to any anomalous cost spikes, avoiding end-of-month surprises. Leveraging machine learning that customizes itself to a customer’s environment, including seasonality, customers are able to proactively detect and resolve cost spikes. With Azure Cost Management, customers need to manually identify anomalous costs, increasing the risk of undiscovered cost spikes that can snowball into large bills by the end of the month.

Key Takeaways:

Azure Cost Management provides a good set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for Azure, and visibility into AWS. As a free tool available to Azure customers, it provides the basics that finance teams and budget owners would want to know. However, they fall short in providing support for multi-cloud setups and container orchestration outside of AKS, which is where the world is headed. To fully leverage the capabilities of Azure Cost Management and get a deep understanding of costs, there’s an inordinate amount of tagging required, and customers find themselves lacking support for day-to-day operations, as with services such as anomaly detection. Azure Cost Management is built for point-in-time views into costs, not for the daily toil that goes into efficient cloud cost management.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, savings, and forecasting, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness understands the pressure good tag hygiene puts on engineering teams, and the requirement to paint a full picture of cloud costs that includes container costs. Harness is a less effort-intensive solution that gets customers more value out of the cloud.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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