CloudHealth
By VMware (Broadcom)
CloudHealth, also known as CloudHealth by VMware, is a cloud cost management and governance platform that gives organizations visibility into spend, usage, and security posture across multiple public cloud accounts and providers. It was…
Definition
CloudHealth, also known as CloudHealth by VMware, is a cloud cost management and governance platform that gives organizations visibility into spend, usage, and security posture across multiple public cloud accounts and providers. It was originally built as an independent product before being acquired by VMware and is used primarily by finance and cloud operations teams to manage multi-cloud budgets, with governance policies layered on top of normalized billing data spanning AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Overview
Organizations running workloads across multiple cloud accounts and providers face a recurring problem: billing data arrives in provider-specific formats, budgets are set in one place while spend happens in another, and no single view exists to answer which business unit is responsible for a given cost. CloudHealth was built to unify this fragmented picture, ingesting billing and usage data from multiple clouds into a single normalized platform for reporting, budgeting, and governance. At a mechanical level, CloudHealth connects to cloud provider billing APIs, such as AWS Cost and Usage Reports or Azure billing exports, and normalizes that data into a common model that supports custom groupings by business unit, application, or environment regardless of which cloud actually hosts a given resource. On top of this normalized data, it layers governance features such as policy-based alerts for unexpected spend or non-compliant resource configurations, along with rightsizing and reserved-instance purchasing recommendations that surface directly inside its reporting dashboards. CloudHealth differs from Kubernetes-native tools like Kubecost by operating at the level of entire cloud accounts and services rather than pod and namespace granularity, making it a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Kubernetes-specific cost tools in organizations running containerized workloads. It also differs from an active optimization engine like Cast AI or Densify by focusing more on reporting, budgeting, and governance workflows than on continuously and automatically reshaping infrastructure on its own. In practice, finance and cloud operations teams use CloudHealth to build monthly cost reports for leadership, set and track budgets per business unit, and enforce governance policies such as tagging standards across a large multi-cloud estate. Its reserved instance and savings plan recommendations are also used to guide procurement decisions ahead of renewal cycles, giving finance teams a concrete basis for negotiating commitments with cloud vendors. The trade-offs include the effort required to establish consistent tagging and account structure for the platform's groupings to be meaningful, and the fact that being part of VMware's now-Broadcom-owned portfolio has led some customers to reassess long-term product direction and pricing following the acquisition. Organizations wanting lighter-weight, cloud-native cost tooling may prefer provider-native cost tools or a narrower point solution focused on a single cost lever. Very large enterprises with complex multi-account structures generally see the strongest return, since manually reconciling billing data by hand across dozens of accounts would otherwise consume significant finance team time each month, time that is better spent acting on the resulting recommendations than assembling the underlying spreadsheets.
Key Features
- Normalizes billing data across multiple cloud providers
- Supports custom cost groupings by business unit or application
- Provides policy-based governance alerts for spend anomalies
- Recommends reserved instance and savings plan purchases
- Offers rightsizing recommendations across cloud accounts
- Generates budget tracking reports for finance and leadership