Harness Cloud Cost Management vs CloudCheckr

Summary:

CloudCheckr from Spot by NetApp (it’s a mouthful, isn’t it?) is very focused on MSPs, and as a result has great billing / chargeback and security features. If all you want is billing management, CloudCheckr is the way to go. However, that billing and security focus came at the cost of a truly usable cloud cost management tool. CloudCheckr has no support for Kubernetes, which drives a large majority of cloud deployments today. And while they claim support for GCP on the website, one look at their documentation shows that there are no user docs to support that claim. Although CloudCheckr is now part of the Spot by NetApp portfolio, it remains a standalone tool that lacks any automation for cloud cost savings.

If you are looking for a complete solution for cloud cost management that includes true support for multi-cloud and Kubernetes, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the right solution for you. We give you deep insights into Kubernetes costs and cluster management, automated cost savings features, and excellent business intelligence and reporting capabilities. All the features your FinOps / DevOps / Engineering teams need without the manual overhead they don’t. 

Multi-cloud costs:

Look at any state of the cloud report today, and you’ll find that the majority of enterprises leverage more than one cloud provider, with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform accounting for the lion’s share of the market. Supporting all 3 the providers is the minimum bar for cloud cost management, and being able to provide all-in-one views of multi-cloud costs is table stakes for users. Harness CCM gives you a complete view of all your multi-cloud costs, in a business perspective that makes sense for your business. 

CloudCheckr does not have the ability to show you AWS and Azure costs in a single dashboard, and in fact, you’ll need to log into separate tools / accounts to see costs for each provider. Their claim to support GCP is not backed up by their documentation, which only provides instructions for AWS and Azure. 

Kubernetes Support:

Modern SaaS infrastructure relies on containers and Kubernetes for easy scalability and flexible deployment models. However, shared cost allocation is a challenge unless you have the tools in place to dig into costs by workload / node / pod / label, etc. Harness CCM provides detailed cost analysis for Kubernetes clusters, at a very granular level that can be tailored for your business. We also deliver automated cluster cost management features such as Cluster Orchestrator for EKS that can save our customers up to 90% on cloud costs.  CloudCheckr has no support for Kubernetes at all.

Forecasting:

With cloud costs, it’s not enough to know what your costs are today, it’s important to see where you are expected to land at the end of the month / quarter / year to understand if you are on target to meet budget expectations. Accurate, long term forecasts are crucial when negotiating savings plans contracts to optimize your cloud spend. That’s why Harness CCM gives you accurate 12 month forecasts, while CloudCheckr is limited to 30 day forecasts.

Reporting:

Seeing and understanding your cloud cost trends is important, so that you can see your cloud usage over time. Seems like an easy thing to do, and just about every cloud cost vendor can provide you a report that gives month over month cloud costs…except for CloudCheckr. If you want historical reporting, go with Harness CCM.