What Is VMware Tanzu CloudHealth?
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is a cloud management platform that provides insights, optimization, and governance for cloud environments. It helps manage costs, improve operational efficiency, and maintain compliance, supporting AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises data centers.
The platform aggregates and analyzes data from cloud environments, offering insights into resource usage, cost trends, and performance metrics. It also provides tools for setting budgets, allocating costs to business units, and creating detailed reports. CloudHealth integrates with other VMware Tanzu products, enabling management across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Since VMware’s acquisition of CloudHealth in 2018, the platform’s development pace has slowed, and its roadmap has become uncertain. CloudHealth has not evolved to address modern cloud challenges such as advanced Kubernetes cost optimization, FinOps automation, or integration with cloud-native observability tools. Many question whether VMware will continue to invest in CloudHealth or eventually replace it with newer Tanzu services.
In this article:
Features of VMware Tanzu CloudHealth on AWS
Here are the key features CloudHealth provides to support AWS environments:
Cost visibility and allocation
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth provides detailed visibility into multi-cloud spending, allowing organizations to track costs by business units, projects, or other groupings. This enables accurate chargeback and showback processes, ensuring adherence to budgets while improving financial accountability.
Resource optimization
The platform offers tools to optimize cloud resources and eliminate unnecessary expenses. For AWS environments, CloudHealth delivers recommendations for rightsizing infrastructure, such as adjusting compute or storage resources to better match usage needs. Additionally, it provides insights for purchasing and managing AWS reserved instances and AWS savings plans.
Cloud governance and automation
CloudHealth allows businesses to implement governance policies that drive continuous optimization and mitigate risks. Automation features can terminate idle or unnecessary resources, enforce budget limits, and detect anomalies in spending or resource usage.
Cloud data insights
The platform aggregates and analyzes data across cloud environments, providing insights for decision-making. Businesses can organize and assess their cloud infrastructure using dynamic business groupings and generate customizable reports.
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth Pricing on AWS
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth's pricing model for AWS aligns with an organization's cloud spend and usage, offering flexibility through multiple contract options. Pricing is primarily determined by the monthly AWS spend that the platform manages, with additional costs applied for usage beyond the contracted amount. Below is an overview of the pricing structure:
Contract-based pricing
CloudHealth offers 12-month, 24-month, and 36-month contracts, with tiered pricing based on the monthly AWS spend managed by the platform. Contracts specify entitlements, and organizations pay upfront or in installments according to their agreement. Longer contract durations offer cost savings.
12-Month Contracts
- CH150K: $45,000 annually to manage up to $150,000 in AWS spend per month.
- CH300K: $90,000 annually to manage up to $300,000 in AWS spend per month.
- CH500K: $150,000 annually to manage up to $500,000 in AWS spend per month.
24-Month Contracts
- CH150K: $90,000 for two years to manage up to $150,000 in AWS spend per month.
- CH300K: $180,000 for two years to manage up to $300,000 in AWS spend per month.
- CH500K: $300,000 for two years to manage up to $500,000 in AWS spend per month.
36-Month Contracts (Includes 12% savings)
- CH150K: $118,800 for three years to manage up to $150,000 in AWS spend per month.
- CH300K: $237,600 for three years to manage up to $300,000 in AWS spend per month.
- CH500K: $396,000 for three years to manage up to $500,000 in AWS spend per month.
Additional usage costs
If an organization exceeds the monthly AWS spend specified in their contract, overage fees are applied. These are charged at a rate of $0.03 per dollar of AWS spend above the contracted amount.
Contract expiry and renewal
Access to VMware Tanzu CloudHealth features is tied to active contracts. If an organization chooses not to renew or replace their contract before it ends, they will lose access to their entitlements.
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Tips from the expert:
In my experience, here are tips that can help you better leverage or transition from VMware Tanzu CloudHealth for AWS:
- Build a meta-governance layer with event-driven policies: CloudHealth lacks robust governance enforcement, so integrate it with tools like AWS Config or custom Lambda functions to trigger actions when CloudHealth detects policy violations. This "meta-governance" layer bridges the enforcement gap.
- Leverage Savings Plans amortization data in external BI tools: CloudHealth’s reporting on Reserved Instances and Savings Plans is often basic. Export amortization and coverage data into Power BI or Tableau for deeper financial modeling and to assess whether your current purchases align with evolving workload patterns.
- Create a parallel tagging validation engine: Because CloudHealth relies heavily on consistent tagging, develop a tagging validation tool using AWS Lambda and Config Rules to proactively audit and report on mis-tagged or untagged resources before they distort CloudHealth reports.
- Feed CloudHealth data into your CI/CD pipeline audits: Use CloudHealth APIs to query cost and utilization data at the deployment stage. Block or flag CI/CD pipelines that trigger unusually expensive deployments or deviate from rightsizing guidelines, enforcing financial discipline pre-deployment.
- Build your own unified cost savings dashboard: To overcome CloudHealth’s fragmented recommendations, aggregate right-sizing, idle resources, and orphaned asset insights via APIs into a custom dashboard, offering a single pane of actionable savings opportunities across all accounts.
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VMware Tanzu CloudHealth vs. AWS CloudWatch vs. AWS Cost Explorer
While all three tools provide cloud visibility, they serve different purposes and operate at different layers of AWS management.
CloudHealth vs. AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch focuses on monitoring infrastructure performance, resource utilization, and operational health. It collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS services and provides alarms and dashboards. CloudHealth, by contrast, emphasizes financial governance and cost optimization across multiple clouds. While CloudWatch tells you if a resource is under- or over-utilized, CloudHealth helps you decide whether that resource should exist, be rightsized, or moved to a savings plan. CloudHealth does not replace CloudWatch but complements it for financial and governance needs.
CloudHealth vs. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer provides direct cost analysis and forecasting inside the AWS console. It is best suited for basic reporting and understanding spending patterns. CloudHealth extends beyond AWS by aggregating costs across multiple cloud providers, applying business context through tagging and business groupings, and offering more advanced reporting and policy-driven automation. For organizations with a single AWS account and simple reporting needs, Cost Explorer may be sufficient. For enterprises with multiple accounts, clouds, and business units, CloudHealth delivers broader governance capabilities.
Related content: Read our guide to CloudHealth vs Cloudability
Limitations of VMware Tanzu CloudHealth on AWS
While VMware Tanzu CloudHealth offers capabilities for cloud cost management, optimization, and governance, there are some limitations and areas for improvement, as identified by users and reviewers on the AWS Marketplace:
- Lack of a centralized cost savings view: While CloudHealth provides cost savings recommendations, it does not offer a centralized location to view all recommendations across services. For example, unassigned Elastic IPs (EIPs) or other underutilized resources may not be aggregated into a single, unified dashboard.
- Connectivity and performance issues: Users have reported occasional lags and screen freezes when using the platform, especially when dealing with large datasets or high traffic.
- Reporting limitations: The reporting functionality, while useful, has room for improvement. Users have noted the lack of customizable and exportable reporting formats, such as direct integration with Microsoft Office for presentations. Additionally, there is a need for more detailed drill-down capabilities into individual resource costs beyond just account-level reporting.
- Complex user interface for beginners: Some users find the interface challenging to navigate, particularly when trying to access frequently used features or specific settings.
- Scalability issues with certain cloud platforms: While CloudHealth supports multiple cloud platforms, its scalability is reportedly limited for some, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Users have highlighted difficulties in deploying the tool effectively in GCP environments compared to AWS.
- Limited integration with external applications: The platform does not currently integrate well with other applications such as web apps, service buses, or traffic managers.
- Governance framework enforcement gaps: Some users have noted that CloudHealth lacks clear mechanisms for enforcing governance frameworks.
- Cost concerns for smaller organizations: The pricing model, which scales with monthly cloud spend, may be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations or those with fluctuating budgets.
Finout: Ultimate CloudHealth Alternative for AWS
Finout is strategically positioned as the definitive alternative to CloudHealth for enterprises managing complex AWS environments. While CloudHealth often struggles with the demands of modern, multi-layered cloud architecture, Finout is purpose-built to solve the most critical pain points from fragmented billing to calculating true unit economics. The result is a platform that delivers superior accuracy, actionable intelligence, and predictable pricing.
Here is how Finout directly solves the limitations of traditional CloudHealth deployments:
- 100% Precise Cost Allocation: Finout’s patented Instant Virtual Tagging solution instantly and accurately allocates 100% of cloud spend. This includes complex shared costs, Kubernetes (EKS) usage, and costs from external SaaS services like Datadog, unifying everything into a single MegaBill. This bypasses CloudHealth’s reported limitations with complex chargeback and reliance on manual native tagging.
- True Business Context and Unit Economics: Finout enables modern FinOps by easily mapping all infrastructure costs (cloud, container, SaaS) directly to business context (e.g., product, feature, or team). This supports critical unit economics analysis and financial governance that is often lacking in CloudHealth.
- Actionable, Automated Optimization: Finout’s CostGuard feature offers an automated approach to waste detection, directly generating actionable Jira tickets for engineering teams. This is a sharp contrast to CloudHealth's more rigid, static-threshold alerting mechanism.
- Predictable, Transparent Pricing: Finout utilizes a fixed, transparent pricing model with no savings fees. This offers a clear financial advantage over CloudHealth's subscription model, which scales unpredictably based on total cloud spend.
Ready to simplify cloud cost management and elevate your FinOps journey?
Book a demo today and see how Finout can transform the way you manage cloud spend.
