Harness Cloud Cost Management vs ServiceNow Cloud Insights

Summary

ServiceNow is a giant in the IT Asset Management, Operations Management and Business Management space, with a breadth of tooling to manage both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Their focus on cloud observability and asset management has made them a go-to vendor for cloud performance monitoring and management. It’s no surprise that they’ve added a tool to their portfolio to report on cloud costs to provide customers more holistic views into their cloud infrastructure. 

However, as strong as they are with performance and portfolio management, they haven’t invested the same level of depth into their cloud cost management and reporting. They can provide basic views of multi-cloud costs, broken down by the basic tags / labels that the cloud providers store, but can’t customize those views to create common cost buckets, nor provide a hierarchical view of costs in your business context. 

If you want to get granular views of your cloud costs, in your business context, combined with automated cloud cost savings features such as Cloud AutoStopping and Cloud Asset Governance, Harness is the way to go. Unlike ServiceNow, we have deep support for Kubernetes cost management, giving you the best insights into your shared cluster costs, and recommendations on how to reduce those costs. 

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 granular level that can be tailored for your business. 

ServiceNow’s support for Kubernetes focuses on infrastructure configuration management, with no support for reporting on Kubernetes costs in any way. They also do not provide cost savings recommendations for Kubernetes in any form. 

Automated Cloud Cost Optimization

Getting engineers to take action on cloud cost recommendations shouldn’t be your only path to cloud cost savings. Automation can unlock cost savings opportunities that simply can’t be realized with manual or scripted efforts. Harness CCM has a multitude of automation tools that save our customers money, from idle cloud resource management (Cloud Autostopping™) to spot instance orchestration, and more, that saves our customers up to 80% on cloud costs. 

ServiceNow does provide schedule based instance shut down, but it’s little better than a manually maintained Lambda script. While this can save on cloud costs, it leaves a lot of cost savings on the table, especially for test resources that are not used consistently during working hours. Any deviations needed from the predetermined schedule need manual administrative attention to execute. Beyond that, ServiceNow does not have any automation to enable cloud cost savings for their customers. 

Cost Anomaly Monitoring

Harness allows 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 customizations for seasonality, customers can proactively detect and resolve cost spikes quickly and easily.

ServiceNow does not have automated anomaly detection for cloud costs.  Their anomaly detection is focused on infrastructure performance and resource utilization, so if cloud costs are spiking, they have no way to alert you to it.