IBM Turbonomic Reviews

We use Turbonomic to evaluate all of our virtualized clusters. Initially, we were only using Turbonomic for our long-term VMware stacks. Now we are monitoring VMware ESXi 7 and Nutanix AHV stacks. On the server side, we have 400 VMs. We don't evaluate the VDI side because we have 1,100 seats, so it's too expensive. We made a special contract on ELA for vRealize Ops for VDI on that side. It wasn't horrible. It's just the bare minimum to show us if there's a problem in the stack.

We mainly use Turbonomic as a heat map, but we aren't drilling down into the performance of individual applications like Kubernetes. That's Docker or Swarm, but we use other tools to monitor the transaction levels, etc., instead of Turbonomic.

Turbonomic is our overall heat map in our NOC. We fire it up, and when we see a red flag, we dig into it, and off we go, but the basic application components do not have our Dockers linked to them. It's just mainly working on the surface of the virtualization stack itself.

Our infrastructure is solid enough that I get a VDI call about every three weeks. My server farms are built like tanks, so it takes a lot to take them down. We can sleep well at night. Everything is on-prem. The only cloud solutions we use at the college are SaaS systems. We don't put much in the cloud because cloud environments are too vulnerable to hacks and exploits. 

We're going from a silo system to HCI — from 450 hard disks to hybrid flash. While we undergo a significant infrastructure change, we're using Turbonomic to watch VMware because it has aged, and our migration isn't happening the way we want. We will probably reevaluate when the next contract is up for Turbonomic instead.

Once we switch to pure Nutanix, we will reevaluate Turbonomic. I will probably keep it because management is used to Turbonomic's reporting. That saves me much OPEX time building those reports out of Nutanix by hand. I've been here for 16 years, and my CIO has been here for 17 years. They're used to the reports we've been developing over the last decade. We developed them using VMTurbo. We set the standard with that first tool for reporting.

We use Nutanix Prism Central to manage everything on the Nutanix side, but Turbonomic provides ancillary information that gives me a holistic view of reporting and more features that Prism Central doesn't cover. Turbonomic provides linkages, visual aids, graphs, charts, etc. 

I'm the one who uses it. It's up on my NOC screen. We log and monitor it pretty much every day. Then, once a month, it generates reports on its own. In that sense, it's used daily or monitored daily. We watch what it's reporting every day on the heat map. Regarding issues and such, maybe every couple of weeks we have something pop up that we look at. 

Turbonomic helped us with cluster projections. We have different-sized hosts in a single cluster. I have two-socket and four-socket hosts sitting in a cluster, so the impacts aren't easy to understand in aggregate. Turbonomic helps to evaluate what will happen in hypothetical configurations. I can forecast the effect of dropping one server and adding another. If I drop a pair of 48 cores and add a single 96 at a different gigahertz, will that be adequate? It can tell you if you need to add more cores to manage your server hardware purchasing. 

It also assists us in evaluating performance risks. The dashboards show what current risks are happening, and we use the planning features to see the what-ifs. We check the heat map daily. If something pops up there, we check it out to prevent issues from happening down the chain. It's mainly on the VMware side with the older VMXs. We haven't found anything on the Nutanix side to be worried about.

Turbonomic has helped us address performance degradation under VMware. It identifies when there's a bottleneck in the storage line, so we can start moving some virtual disks around to different ones. It helps in the older silo structure. The performance degradation is on the VMware or the fiber channel SAN side. Some of the SANs are nine years old. 

It is able to identify points before we even noticed them. We're meeting all our SLAs because it never gets to the point where they catch something. They might say, "Oh, it seems a little slow," and then they'll return from lunch, saying, "Oh, it's okay again." 

We log into it in the morning and let it sit up in the NOC. We take a peek when it shows something. We'll check it out if it's red, but it'll usually clear up if it's yellow. For example, all systems might run at 110% immediately before registration closes while students try to get their last class for their senior year registered before the other students. We'll return to our normal 20-30% usage in about an hour and a half. 

They won't notice a thing because we'll be moving to more of a Kubernetes Docker-style system with Nutanix Carbon. I will probably try to integrate that with Turbonomic. We will probably connect Turbonomic deeper into that stack because that will be able to pull and spin up new Dockers automatically on hardware and not within anything else, giving the server room to spin up another Docker. Theoretically, I've got room for about 600 more containers, and we currently use 15. 

We're centralized IT. I use Turbonomic mainly as a showback because we don't charge our different departments. There technically is no charge in our current Red Hat licenses, and that's picked up. We pick that up and get requests in. There is no self-service here.

The instructor says, "I need 400 cores and two terabytes of RAM to run my analysis." I'm like, "That's how they run it on a supercomputer. We don't have those here. Now, if your research grant wants to buy us one, sure, we'll set it up. Tell us where the half-million dollars is, and we'll set it up for you." There's no self-service here, but we use it for a showback.

We had Turbonomic load-balancing all our clusters, and we did not let VMware load-balance our clusters because of the algorithms. Their marketing and share algorithms were much more precise than VMware's because I had disparate-sized servers. 

VMware liked to put a heavy load on my little boxes and leave my big boxes alone, or it stuffed the big boxes full and left the little boxes alone. Turbonomic keeps everything about even. Their algorithm for load balancing was much cleaner until the ESXi 7 than VMware. That made the hardware more cost-effective because I didn't have little guys sleeping in a corner someplace sucking up hardware, power, and cooling while not doing any work all day.

Resource starvation has never been an issue for use. We run different resource pools, and we've never had any service hit 100%. I have redundancies and reserve capacities needed to weather any storm. We use Turbonomic primarily to monitor and maintain equal resources on all servers. 

We've never had a server hit 100%. I might have one hit 80% periodically before they moved something around. We've been in the VMware game since 2.X back when a monster server had four cores and 32 gigs of RAM. We've been virtualized over 80% for the last 12 years. We've been heavily virtualized for over 80% of the previous decade. We knew virtualization was the way it was going and went for it.

It reduced our operational expenditures because I have reclaimed some of the time typically spent generating reports. It's part of our system, and we just use it. Turbonomic is part of our network operations center. The dashboard is on my screen, so I can see if the indicators turn yellow or red. I can address the issue before it gets to the point where I'm getting calls from the service desk.

I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software.

We look at the resizing recommendations in the reports, but we don't follow all of them because we know the ebb and flow of our systems. It shows us the storage array evaluations for our storage devices. We have some older primary channel VNX systems. 

The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens.

When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

We've been on Turbonomic since version 2. 

I haven't had it fail, especially with the 8.X line. Other users report bugs, but we've never encountered any of those issues in our own implementation. Once, I didn't patch it for a year, and it kept running. No Windows system can be up for 365 days and not need a reboot. This solution is rock solid.

We scaled Turbonomic up but not out. We didn't try to add more nodes of Turbonomic, but we increased the size of the current VM.

I rate IBM support a nine out of ten. I haven't talked to the head engineer for Turbonomic in nine years because he moved up, and they got a real support tier going. I contact their support probably once or twice a year. They typically solve the issue within an hour.

Nobody is ever perfect. Perfect is when they call me to let me know there is a problem before I realize it. That's my old life at Hewlett-Packard, but I don't want to talk about what that support contract costs.

Positive

Setting up Turbonomic is pretty straightforward if you take it slowly. If you assume you know the answer and click "next" automatically, you will run into an issue here or there. You must properly set up your permissions in the vCenter and Nutanix before you install. I always make a Turbonomic-specific local ID so it can't be used anywhere else.

It's a nice security practice using a local account for Nutanix and one for vCenter to connect proper permissions. After the prerequisites are in place, it is relatively straightforward. It used to be pretty cumbersome for the licensing. I haven't done a fresh installation since 8.1. It wasn't as simple before 8.1, and it seems like they've streamlined it even more in 8.5. I don't think you'll face any challenges if you follow the instructions and set up the accounts it needs to connect to from the appliance ahead of time.

It took about 15 minutes to configure Turbonomic for Nutanix because I connected through Prism Central. That includes verification and making sure the data is coming in. For VMware, it took no more than 10 minutes per vCenter that I added. I spent probably half an hour reading instructions to ensure everything was right before I started.

I've been doing this for so long. We've been doing VMware since 2.X. It was all done on-premise. We had support back in the day if there was an implementation problem. We had support on the phone with us until it was resolved. We had more problems back when it was still called VMTurbo. When I called support, I would get a senior engineer who actually wrote code for VMTurbo instead of a support desk. 

The ROI for us is a reduction in operating expenditures. We fix problems before they become issues that our clients see. I don't need to spend an hour a month putting together reports for upper management. We've identified the canned reports they'd like to see and Turbonomic builds them in PDF files. I'm still working 50-60 hours a week, but that's not 51 and 62.

I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume I have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing.

We're not in the cloud, so we pay per VM. I have the license set at $500. We have around 400 VMs. I don't have to go over the price break at $500 that we got. We're a public institution, so I can't talk about the exact cost, but I can talk about strategy. We discovered that the one VM at $500 was better than getting four plus a couple of 10 packs. It was better for us to go ahead and call 500 in and use that as our leverage to bring the cost down.

We evaluated VMware, vRealize, and Gotti. At the time, Turbonomic was called VMTurbo. We chose VMTurbo because it was the best fit. Gotti didn't do enough, and vRealize was way out of our price range. They later changed their price structure, but we stayed with Turbonomic.

I rate IBM Turbonomic a nine out of ten. Before implementing Turbonomic, you should do your research. Check the documentation to see if Turbonomic's processes make sense for what you're doing and if your current setup will handle all the different aspects of Turbonomic. If your current solution does 85% of what you need, and Turbonomic does 87%, I don't think that's enough to switch products. If your solution meets 80% of your need, and Turbonomic does 98%, why wouldn't you change?

What do you need to do? I can flip a quarter or half-dollars instead of quarters. If all you're doing is flipping dimes, do you need something that flips half-dollars? I'm frugal. I worked for a 501(c)3 nonprofit most of my life before I came to this college.

I look for bang for my buck and stability. I used to describe to other system admins that I may not have the flashiest new Volvo turbo diesel truck that goes up the hills. My Peterbilt with a CAT diesel may smoke and have a little rust on it, but in the middle of a subzero blizzard, it's making that hill while yours is gelled up at the bottom.

Take a long, hard look at the pre-generated reports and how it holistically checks your system from top to bottom through the tree to see if that's a good fit for you. You can't change that tree. If the homepage tree doesn't work for you, then Turbonomic won't work.

There's not much I know you can do to change that. If that tree makes sense to you, then look at the reporting. Look at how it evaluates load balancing based on shares instead of just the overall weight that VMware does. Turbonomic uses market shares.

They turn it into a cost market share to help adjust. It will tell you if a CPU load is heavy. It will give you recommendations to adjust the size. We're not going to move it right away because what is mission-critical is over here, and we don't want to impact that. VMware looks at how heavily the CPU is being utilized in the VM and says, "Well, I'm going to slap that over here," arbitrarily.

Turbonomic has a share you set up. Think of it like stock market shares. That share went up, but it's not a blue-chip stock. We try to move it over to where the blue chip stocks would take a hit. We move it someplace that's a lesser value, so to speak, once machines are of lesser value.

Turbonomics helps us understand resource usage and enables us to make decisions about how to utilize those resources. For example, let's say you check your monthly water bill and see that it's up 25 percent, but you don't know why. It keeps going like that until you check your toilet and find that the seal is slightly broken. 

Every now and then, a tool will keep running when you're not using it. Turbonomics will identify when the toilet is running and fix it for you, so your bill goes up. It automatically makes the adjustments.  

Our organization uses cloud-based infrastructure, so everything is metered. You're wasting money if you have a system running but you're not using it. Turbonomic can take that system offline or suspend it. It can also adjust resources so that they're optimal for a particular workload. It gives you visibility and also takes action automatically. 

Turbonomic offers a single platform for optimizing complex, mixed environments. With APM integration, it can tell you how each application is performing and rationalize the resources to ensure the optimal configuration for performance, so there's no waste. It will make those adjustments for you based on application trends. It covers the complete stack all the way up from your UI down to your core host machine if you're running on a VM or the physical machine if you're running on a device. It tries to ensure consistency and hasn't caused any additional overhead on my applications. 

The automation features are helpful because engineers no longer need to focus on fixing issues. They can spend their time on innovation and more important things. Right now, a lot of the work is still being done manually. When I get alerts, I send a staff member to make adjustments, but I can't do that in real time. It might take days or weeks to address a ticket. The meter is constantly running while we're waiting to fix that so that money is going down the drain.

It's hard to quantify how much time we save using Turbonomic, but it's around 20 percent. I only do analysis and remediation on maybe Tuesday and Thursday. It's not about the time that I waste; it's about the time and cost we can recover. I no longer need to wait until Tuesday. If something happens on the weekend, the tool can fix it on Sunday. It does save time, but the bigger aspect is cost savings.

The core expense of our setup is cloud costs, so cloud management is a huge piece of our financial operations. We're constantly looking at cloud spending and ways to make that more efficient. 

I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information. 

We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then. 

We've been evaluating Turbonomic for the last few months. 

Turbonomic is stable. 

Turbonomic is highly scalable. 

In addition to Turbonomic, we have a tool called Apptio Cloudability that gives you a report on what you spent that month. I have to go back and identify what is going on. Turbonomic identifies the issue, records it, and fixes it with no manual intervention. We also used the native cloud solutions provided by Amazon or Google, but they weren't as effective as Turbonomics. 

Turbonomic is fairly easy to deploy. The product is highly intuitive from a deployment standpoint. We worked with a consultant from the vendor. The deployment team consisted of five or six people.

We evaluated and purchased Apptio Cloudability. Turbonomics offered an opportunity to reduce the costs of our physical environment, but it's also part of our cloud journey. The cloud capabilities were a significant factor for us. 

I rate Turbonomic nine out of 10. It goes into a lot of detail about what you know and your opportunities, but there's always room to improve. 

We leverage IBM Turbonomic to manage our 28 on-premises data centers, effectively optimizing resources and ensuring their operational efficiency. It helps us automate workload scaling to guarantee consistent application performance. Additionally, while we primarily use Turbonomic for on-premises management, we also utilize it within our AWS environment for cost optimization purposes. This allows us to identify and implement cost-saving measures within the cloud.

One of our key challenges was finding a tool that could provide a holistic view of our entire environment and report back key data points, such as CPU and memory usage. This would allow us to identify potential areas for cost savings. We were frequently receiving requests to increase resources like memory and CPU, so we needed a tool that not only gave us historical data but also empowered us to take action, whether that meant automating changes or manually making the changes and IBM Turbonomic does that.

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting.

Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. 

The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application.

Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation.

Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time.

IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days.

IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering.

By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs.

It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings.

IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance.

IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand. This improves elasticity and responsiveness to application needs. Additionally, IBM Turbonomic helps us track and quantify cloud cost savings, facilitating informed decision-making.

We're also implementing FinOps principles. By collaborating with other departments, we can demonstrate the cost implications of various resource allocations. For example, specifying a minimum processor requirement might incur higher cloud costs. This increased awareness through IBM Turbonomic allows us to predict impact and make cost-effective decisions.

Turbonomic can modernize the look and feel, making it more user-friendly to access and obtain information.

I have been using IBM Turbonomic for over two years.

IBM Turbonomic is one of the most stable solutions that I have worked with in the last 26 years.

IBM Turbonomic is highly scalable.

The technical support team is both responsive and knowledgeable. They quickly escalate complex issues to someone who can resolve them efficiently.

Positive

The initial deployment proved complex due to our extensive environment, encompassing over 23,000 VMs. This necessitated a year-long rollout, overseen by a dedicated team comprising a salesperson and a senior technical expert.

IBM Turbonomic helped us with the implementation. They were a great partner.

We have seen a return on investment with IBM Turbonomic.

IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns. We justified the purchase based on its potential to significantly reduce costs, which will allow us to recoup the investment and generate additional benefits. This ultimately makes refinancing a worthwhile option.

I would rate IBM Turbonomic ten out of ten.

We need to perform regular maintenance due to the frequent release of updates.

I recommend that users review their internal processes and partner with other departments to facilitate company-wide implementation. Collaboration will be crucial, so ensure they have a FinOps practice in place, or establish one if necessary.

We use it to optimize costs and resource efficiency across our environments and  present infrastructure change requests to the business.

We had a lack of knowledge about things at our product level, and Turbonomic helped us resolve that. From an integration perspective, it also helped us find connectivity between our gateway tool products.

When it comes to optimizing costs and resource efficiency, before Turbonomic, we would add big, expensive storage and scale up across the tenant. Now, we are able to allocate the resources we need. We can also justify to the business, based on usage, why we are going with those resources. We have all kinds of proof to explain to the business how we are scaling down.

The visibility and analytics into our environment’s performance, from the APM down to the infrastructure, help us illustrate and clarify for the business the types of infrastructure changes we are suggesting. And they give us approval. Although we can collect the same information from Azure, Turbonomic is very user-friendly, and we can also automate notifications.

Regarding policy implementation, that can be implemented by a skilled engineer in five to 10 minutes. But if that same task is assigned to a new engineer who is not familiar with Turbonic, he would have to reference the previous document and the previous policy. Implementing the same thing would take that new engineer 15 to 20 minutes.

I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation that actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and it simplifies our IT engineers' jobs.

The platform is continually updated with new features. If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers be more satisfied with the updates and push them into their environments.

Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase. If they could provide those enhancements, that would be really great. For example, we are spending a lot of time on Azure Databricks, exploring it and trying to do cost optimization as well as setting up the policies. If Turbonomic could help us understand how much the Databricks CPU is using per instance or workspace, that would help us optimize it, scale it according to our business requirements, and decrease costs.

We have been using IBM Turbonomic in the cloud for the past year.

The stability depends on how you set up the policies and logic. In general, Turbonomic is stable.

It's scalable because we are hosted in the cloud. We can expand it vertically.

I'm an open-source guy, so I used a lot of open-source code to do the cost optimization through scripting. One reason Turbonomic was our first choice was that our on-prem team was already using it.

We have it set up in the cloud and on-premises. I wasn't involved in the initial deployment as it was already on-prem. We just expanded it to the cloud. That operation was very easy. We just opened the access to the cloud. That was it.

We have a test environment, so we apply things on the test environment and make sure our policies are having the proper effects and are working perfectly. We can work on an environment-by-environment basis.

There is not much maintenance involved, other than applying patches.

There are a lot of options available, but compared to other products, Turbonomic has many features. Other products are at a more beginning stage.

When you do your initial assessment, you have to understand your business needs and then choose the product.

We don't use the full functionality of Turbonomic because our company is subject to regulations around making those changes. Some of that functionality would require going through a change process. We've been using it more for heuristics and analysis on the right-sizing of our VMs and VMware.

At the resource level, Turbonomic has enabled us to right-size our converged infrastructure to a more appropriate level. Instead of using 12, we can use 10. It has been really good in helping us size the environment for our compute.

Another benefit is that it has helped reduce performance degradation. That happens at the application layer sometimes, and then a reset happens and everything is fine again. I would estimate it reduces performance degradation by 10 percent.

It has helped us streamline a lot of those applications. We're leveraging faster configurations on our VMs. Those systems that are being virtualized are operating with better peak performance whenever it's required, and that's what Turbonomic really does. It gives us insight into those peaks and valleys that we tend to go through.

The solution has also reduced resource congestion and starvation. For us, it's always a matter of refreshes. I like the forecasting tool that Turbonomic has where you punch in what you have today and it assesses the history of that setup. Then you can say, "I want to replace it with a snazzy, new compute/storage component," and it will provide a recommendation. That is a very good forecasting tool.

A lot of the features in Turbonomic are valuable. The placement features are really good, allocating the load of VMs between systems within a VMware cluster. The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature.

It also offers hot-memory increases, whenever they're applicable.

In addition, it gives us visibility and analytics into our environment, to a limited point. It does SQL components and, likely, in the newer versions, it has more of that layer. But, we're using it at the VMware level. We have tie-ins to our Pure Storage, and we're using it for discovery of that, as well as of our Cisco UCS for compute. It does delve down into the infrastructure level, if you allow it to do so.

Those analytics are important for understanding, historically, what sort of load a system handles over a certain period of time. If you have a system that is running efficiently and fine, but there is a year-end or month-end or quarterly-end report that needs to run, Turbonomic allows us to anticipate our requirements. For example, when those reports come up, it might be one of those times when we need to bump up the memory and CPU for that cycle. Turbonomic is very good for that aspect, from the standpoint of productivity. It does a lot of recommendations for placement, although we don't enable that in our environment because it's controlled. But it has a lot of good features.

Before IBM bought Turbonomic we had already been using it for four years.

The stability has been pretty good. 

One thing of note is that we did go through an upgrade from one Turbonomic appliance to a newer version and, unfortunately, a policy that was created and that was meant to be kept disabled, was transferred over and enabled. That wreaked havoc on our VMware landscape. It started making changes to servers, such as memory-up and memory-down changes, and that caused a big kerfuffle.

Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing. 

When Turbonomic was under its own flag, they would hold our hands every step of the way. That included everything from proactive upgrades to the appliance, to recommendations, and best fits for us.

When IBM bought it, we renewed the product for one more year. When I had a license that had expired, I was having such difficulty doing anything on their portal or getting support on the product. Ever since IBM took it over, it doesn't look like we have been getting the support we used to under Turbonomic.

Negative

We did not have a previous solution.

I'm the one who deployed the virtual appliance, connected it to our vCenter, and did the add-ons for Pure Storage and Dell storage. The setup, back then, was pretty straightforward. The complexity came in when we started having to use policies and rules. That's where we got a lot of help from Turbonomic.

The full deployment from end to end, with policies, took just over a couple of weeks. We have under 10 users of the product.

I did the deployment of the appliance by myself while the configuration of the group policies and rules was done with Turbonomic's assistance. There were two of us from my company who were focused on the deployment and we had two or three individuals on it from Turbonomic.

I consider the pricing to be high.

We looked at one or two other solutions, but those would probably have been renamed or rebranded since then, just like Turbonomic.

My advice would be to come up with an agreement, in writing, that support on the product will have quarterly touch-point meetings to discuss what's new, what has changed, and what upgrades there are. Those quarterly touchpoints would be an ask, for me, if I had to buy the product again. For the initial deployment, I would recommend some sort of professional services engagement from IBM, just to make sure that you're utilizing it to its best potential.

If you're looking into Turbonomic but already have a process for optimizing your environment and for monitoring, I would suggest doing a comparison between what you have today and what Turbonomic can do. Do a like-for-like on the functions you use today and ask if Turbonomic does the same and whether it does it better. Also, you need to look into the licensing model. Be ready with those questions. You want to make sure Turbonomic will be a suitable replacement and not fall short because your current tool does more.

In terms of understanding when a performance risk exists, the solution does help to a certain point. It says "increase," or "decrease." But it doesn't give explicit information as to why. It doesn't say, "This system has been running hot for X number of days or weeks." Those kinds of details aren't there. It just provides a recommendation.

I would rate the potential of Turbonomic as a seven out of 10. I love the fact that there is slight automation, if you let it do that automation, and the whole forecasting piece is really good. It's a pretty good solution.

I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs and their solution. 

Turbonomic provides visibility and analytics into an environment’s performance. The visibility and analytics help bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, such as Applications and Infrastructure. Having this visibility, specifically for cloud optimization, is extremely important

This has helped reduce our mean time to resolution (MTTR). On average there is about a 10% to 20% reduction, but it can be up to 60%.

Turbonomic has shortened application response time. It has made them more agile.

It's very good for optimizing the monitoring of the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. There are some health tools. It is extremely good for that. It is good for our clients to have visibility. It helps to have a complete view of what is going on.

Their automation has helped engineers focus on innovation and ongoing modernization projects. It has saved us about 30% of our work time. Having visibility for particular solutions helped resolve issues, troubleshoot the management of clusters, and so on. It helped to reallocate resources to other parts of the business.

Our clients have seen about 10%-20% of savings from utilizing Turbonomic. 

It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well.

It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications.

I have been in the IT industry for about 25 years, and I have been working with this solution for about six years.

It is extremely stable. It works perfectly.

The scalability is okay. It sometimes has problems with the hybrid nature of things, but it is fairly scalable.

We do not use their support. Everything is done in-house.

We have used different ones provided by VMware. The solution is specific to the client. Turbonomic is one of the solutions we provide. It is extremely good and very easy to use. 

I am not involved in its deployment. In terms of maintenance, there are general updates, and making sure the platform works and you are getting what you need from it.

The deployment model depends on the requirements, but 90% of the time, it is in the cloud. In certain classes, it is deployed in the cloud, managing multiple hybrid infrastructures between the cloud and on-prem. In certain circumstances, it is separated between different sites across the globe.

I would definitely recommend a trial. It is a very good product, and it is worth its weight. It is something that is invaluable to most customers.

I would rate Turbonomic a nine out of ten.

Initially, our use case was to reduce cloud spend. But Turbonomic is much more than just a reduction-in-cloud-spend tool. As we went on, it became more about optimizing applications and making sure that they function as expected, while reducing the cost of cloud resources. It became a question of how we make applications function properly, at speed, with the best cost possible, and without creating any risk for the application itself.

Turbonomic has shed light on processes, on how applications actually function for people. The folks in the IT organization still tend to build large, to oversize things, to make sure that their applications perform properly. Turbonomic sheds light on what could be a more efficient application and deployment.

We use it in a multi-cloud environment.

My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen, whether that be through an approval process during the workflow, or whether it be someone executing it on a weekend because they're working in their own environment.

We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps. You might say that's a weakness, but it's not what it's supposed to do.

If it had the reporting, it would be a 10 out of 10.

I've been using IBM Turbonomic for four years.

Since we moved to the SaaS deployment, I haven't noticed any issues. About five years ago when I started evaluating it, there were some on-prem issues, but not with the SaaS solution.

Scalability is not a problem. If you need more, just buy more licenses and it expands. They monitor that and expand your instances. It's not something you need to worry about.

Their tech support is very responsive. They are part of IBM and not just Turbonomic anymore, so they've grown exponentially over time. But I found, in working with their engineers on the tickets we submitted, that they were very responsive, getting back to us as quickly as they could on the challenges we were having. They have been helpful.

Positive

We would go quarter-to-quarter and say, "Okay, go optimize our application environments." We could use Azure Monitor or a couple of other tools that aren't nearly as robust, and without knowing the impact, other than what Azure Monitor gives you. But Azure Monitor, which doesn't do memory metrics, would tell you, "You can reduce size by doing this," but maybe memory was the problem. Turbonomic is much more robust. Before using it, we were doing things in a very manual way. 

The way I got Turbonomic through the door was by saying, "You want to have your entire staff clean up the cloud every quarter?"

The initial deployment is very straightforward. The Kubernetes stuff was a little beyond me because I'm not a Kubernetes person. But once we got somebody who knew Kubernetes involved, it was pretty straightforward. It takes less than a few hours and that's for an enterprise. It can be done very quickly.

We started with the solution on-prem, but I quickly moved it to the SaaS model because with on-prem there's a lot to manage. It's a Kubernetes cluster and you need a Kubernetes administrator. You have to have rights to it. There are a lot of other moving parts when you manage it yourself. Once you move to a SaaS-based solution, the burden of keeping the product upgraded and up to date is on Turbonomic. I don't want to manage updates and patches.

With the SaaS solution, there is no maintenance on our side.

Our internal resources worked with the Turbonomic team. After that, I turned over the application to the team that is going to be supporting the applications, because I have no insight into applications. That's not my role. Turbonomic is meant to be in their hands, not mine.

There were three to four people involved initially. Once you get it installed, you start bringing in your DevOps engineers to have them understand it, and they'll work with the application support people. 

The team grows as large as it has to, depending on how many application teams and DevOps engineers you have. People can manage their applications or they can manage multiple applications. You can divide it up, so the teams vary in size. But it's always going to land as close to the application as it can, to get the right people to make the right decisions. If you're a very large organization, you don't centralize the product. It doesn't work well that way.

Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great. Like any software, if it sits on a shelf and no one uses it, it's a waste of money. If you implement it and do the right things before you start using it, the ROI is very fast. And then you can justify the cost, because the ROI is very quick.

We had a couple of hiccups, but we planned for about a nine-month ROI, in the course of a three-year plan. If you put the resources into it and you dedicate the time to it, then ROI is very attainable. If you just let the product churn and tell you what's going on, and don't do anything, then you don't get ROI and don't actually reduce your cloud spend.

I looked at CloudHealth, Cloudability, and one other. We went with Turbonomic because of the intelligence engine. It uses AI to make determinations on data that's coming in at a faster pace than humans can comprehend. People can't monitor a thousand VMs and keep track of them on a daily, hourly, or minute-by-minute basis. With Cloudability, it's not done as efficiently and it's not done with AI. It has cloud-native optimization tools, and they're not as accurate. Turbonomic provides you with accurate, almost up-to-the-minute, information about your application performance, VMs, databases, and storage performance at a much faster pace than humans could ever do. That's why I liked it so much.

Turbonomic does give you visibility into your environment’s performance as well as analytics, from the application layer all the way down the stack. But it does not give you as much as others do. More specialized applications, like New Relic, go much deeper, but with those products, those features are an additional cost. How much is enough is what it really comes down to. How much monitoring and in-depth analytics do you need? Some applications need much more and some don't. If a website is running fine, don't worry about it. In that case, you just need to know the up/down status and that's it. If you're running database queries and things are running slow, you might need deeper analytics. Turbonomic doesn't do that.

Whenever we have a specific application that we need to go into deeper, we will use New Relic or SolarWinds or the like; a dedicated application performance monitoring tool. Turbonomic does have the ability to target apps, but we're not quite there yet.

Educate yourself on the product, as well as on the process. The process is even more important than the product because people need to understand that you're going to be making some changes to the environment. If they're resistant to that, then you're going to have challenges getting Turbonomic to be useful.

You not only need executive buy-in and senior leadership buy-in, you also need your engineers' buy-in. If your executives don't buy into it, your engineers certainly aren't going to. And even if your executives have bought into it, you still have to get the engineers on board because there are all kinds of ways not to do work.

And you have to understand your own company's processes around how to make changes to an environment. What is your change control process? Can you make changes in dev, test, and QA without a change ticket? How do you do production? Do you, in fact, do production?

I would recommend doing something like a workshop where you look at all the applications you're going to point Turbonomic at. Get each team together and explain to them how it's going to work and how it benefits them, as opposed to: "We bought a new product. You're going to use it. Deal with it." People like to know how it impacts their lives and why they're potentially doing more work. In the long run, it actually becomes less work. It's just hard to get past that point. In the movie "Cast Away" it was really hard for Tom Hanks to get past those waves. But once he got past them, he was fine. It's something like that, but not as dramatic; it's not that you're trying to save your life. But you have to explain to people why there's going to be some upfront work: to save them a lot of work on the back end.

In terms of the solution's visibility and analytics helping to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, we're working on that. Implementing Turbonomic is a journey. It's not "install it, and then it does what it does." You have to learn it and integrate it into your environment and your workflows. It does shed light on infrastructure and application teams having to work together, and that's a good thing. Application teams generally don't like infrastructure teams because they don't give them enough infrastructure. Infrastructure teams think the application teams complain too much. Turbonomic says, "Here is what you guys are doing. And here is how to get it done right. Work together," and everybody will be happy. That's more of a "people challenge" and less of a technology challenge.

But the visibility and analytics have not yet reduced our mean time to resolution. The solution hasn't had any impact on our application response time and it's not supposed to. Turbonics is supposed to change your resources based on your schedule, and you shouldn't notice it doing anything, except for the downtime that an application sometimes requires. It should be seamless.

Similarly, when it comes to helping our engineers focus on innovation and modernization, it's a work in progress. That's hard to quantify. It's our role, as architects, to help people do their jobs better and have more time to do innovation versus fixing. We are definitely spending less time worrying about application performance, because Turbonomic takes care of that. But in terms of innovation, I have no way to quantify that. We have people learning it and using it, but are we innovating better? I hope so.

We did some digging into Kubernetes and the solution does show you some good insights there, and it may have come a little farther in that regard since the last time I was hands-on with it. It gave us good insight into what our Kubernetes clusters were doing. Since then, we have moved on to doing more IaaS-based stuff.

Overall, it's the best product for APM that I've seen.

We primarily used it for the rightsizing of VMs. I have used it in both Azure and AWS. We also used it for the right categorization of disks.

We also used it quite a bit for comparison. We wanted to see if we migrate from on-prem to the cloud, what the cost would look like. We used it for what-if analysis.

Rightsizing and right categorization are part of optimization exercises. Turbonomic provides a single platform to help optimize costs and resource efficiency.

It provides good visibility of performance at the resource level. This visibility and analytics have helped bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as Applications and Infrastructure.

The visibility and analytics from Turbonomic have not helped reduce our mean time to resolution. We only used it for cost savings and not optimization.

Turbonomic has not impacted our application performance. You can do it if you integrate it with a tool like Dynatrace but not in itself.

Turbonomic can optimize the monitoring of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. That is where it specializes. With respect to the cloud, their algorithm is pretty good, and their recommendations are relatively trustworthy as compared to other tools. For cloud optimization, it is pretty good. It is also pretty good for balancing on-prem resources.

On the on-prem side, we had some automation or scheduling in place. On the cloud side, we did not do any scheduling. On the on-prem side, it would automatically go and make the changes needed, but on the cloud side, we took the recommendations, and we made the changes ourselves. We did not schedule them in the cloud. It is hard to quantify the time saved, but the analysis part is pretty good. We must have saved time and money.

Turbonomic helped to optimize costs and automate the changes on-prem. There were savings, but I do not have an exact number because we did it in phases. The first time, there would be more savings, and from the second round, they would slow down because you already reaped the benefit from the first-time recommendations. We did not do all the changes at once, so I do not have the numbers, but typically, any organization would have 20% savings in VMs and disks. Turbonomic does a good job. It depends on how big an organization is, but on average, the tool can cut down the VM cost by 20%.

Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good. It was useful for the rightsizing and the right categorization of virtual machines and disks.

I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more.

I have been using this solution for three years. I have used it in my current company, and before that, I used it in another company. I brought it into that company. We did the RFP. There were quite a few suppliers who came and did the presentation. We then selected Turbonomic. That was before IBM took it over.

There were some issues, but they were not very frequent. 

It was good. I did not see any big issues, but we did not scale it a lot. We added a couple of accounts later, and it was okay.

Their support was pretty good. There were some very good engineers who helped us. Turbonomic's support is top-notch. When needed, they brought specialists. It was pretty good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was just using cloud-native tools. Turbonomic saves time on the cumbersome tasks that we have to do with the native tools. Its recommendations are good.

Turbonomic is real-time. When you are using cloud-native tools, you are chasing the wheel, and by the time you are done with the analysis, the data is too old. Turbonomic's algorithm provides real-time analysis and recommendations, which are pretty useful.

In terms of application awareness, Turbonomic did not provide a lot of value. We could group it, but cloud-native tools provided the tagging capability. We did not do a lot with Turbonomic in terms of application visibility.

We did not go with the SaaS offering. We most probably implemented it on-prem. I was not involved in its deployment in this company, but I was involved in my previous company.

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of the setup. It is not as straightforward as they say during the sales calls, but most of the complications that we faced were from our side.

We did it ourselves with the help of Turbonomic engineers. It probably took us two months because of the processes that we had to follow.

It required people from all areas. We needed people from security, on-prem data center management, and storage teams, but they were not required for the entire two months. On average, three to four people were required on a need basis.

The optimization with Turbonomic reduced our organization's OPEX.

I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools.

We evaluated four or five tools, such as AppTio and Flexera. We went for Turbonomic because the algorithm was very good, conservative, and trustworthy.

Their support was also very good. There was a lot of hand-holding. There were regular meetings. For any questions we had, good support was always available.

I have not seen the new product after IBM acquired it, but based on my experience, I would advise building trust slowly. Whatever recommendations it is giving, first validate them. After the trust is established, you can do more things in terms of implementing recommendations.

My experience with Turbonomic has been good. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I belong to the on-premises team. We're a telecom company with a private and public cloud, but we don't use Turbonomic for the cloud infrastructure. We use Turbonomic for capacity forecasting and analysis. We do not use the solution as much on the application layer. We scan only the infrastructure. Turbonomic isn't providing any useful reports on the application layer. We did some application groupings, but it didn't help us because we didn't receive any application information. 

There are more than 50 Turbonomic users at the company, including admins and developers. There is a 10-person admin team, and the rest are end-users with limited access to see the reports on their machines.

Turbonomic provides recommendations about ideal resource levels. It helps us identify where we lack capacity and require more resources. These forecasts save time because we can avoid a capacity crisis. It tells us where to place the machines, so resources are automatically balanced. Those recommendations are there from the tool. That has helped.

It is a standard tool that helps to analyze capacity metrics. Without Turbonomic, we would struggle to manage capacity planning. It is essential to have a tool like Turbonomic because we rely on it for VMware capacity planning.

Turbonomic helped to reduce performance degradation by forecasting utilization and notifying us when we need to increase hardware resources before it reaches a critical threshold. Our SLAs require us to maintain 24/7 availability. 

The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful. 

It can tell us where performance is lagging on the hardware layer. It's not on the application layer. Turbonomic can tell us where our memory and disks are to the point where performance will suffer. 

Turbonomic will identify causes and suggest actions in one unique report. For example, if a memory center is underutilized, it might suggest increasing utilization from 16 to 20 percent.

The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer. 

I would like them to add some apps for physical device load resourcing and physical-to-virtual calculation. It gives excellent recommendations for the virtual layer but doesn't have the capabilities for physical-to-virtual analysis.

Automated deployment is something else they could add. Some built-in automation features are helpful, but we aren't effectively using a few. We want a few more automated features, like autoscaling and automatic performance optimization testing would be useful. 

I have been using Turbonomic for nine years.

Turbonomic is 100% stable. I've never seen any downtime. 

Turbonomic is scalable. 

I rate IBM support a nine out of ten. They've been there when we needed support. We haven't had to escalate any tickets lately, but they provided decent support during the initial deployment.

Positive

Before Turbonomic, I used a solution called VMware ONE Service. I started to use Turbonomic when I switched roles. I don't know why the company adopted Turbonomic, but it was in use when I joined. 

The setup is straightforward. It involves bringing down all the services from vCenter. There's nothing complicated about it. Deployment takes half a day once you have all the prerequisites, like the IP hosts, record ports, firewall configurations, etc. The virtual operations team handles deployment and maintenance. It's about ten people. 

I rate IBM Turbonomic six out of ten. I would recommend it for capacity planning. Decision makers want to predict workloads and plan. We get excellent reports and recommendations for machine optimization and sizing. I wouldn't recommend it for monitoring. 

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending.

It can consolidate and amalgamate all the efforts. Before using it, we had multiple reports, tools, and sources of information that we needed to consolidate. With IBM Turbonomic, we can operate everything in a single console and view everything in a unified way. This allows us to address key performance issues and spending concerns that we identify, optimizing our operations to work better for our customers and us.

The overall price, the dashboards, and the FinOps capabilities are important features. The ability to manage all the budgets is also crucial.

The implementation could be enhanced.

I have been using IBM Turbonomic as an integrator for the past year.

50 users are using this solution. As an integrator, we're constantly looking for new logs and trying to make some of our customers for whom we do not provide cloud services part of that new ecosystem.

Initially, it can be tricky as you have to configure everything. The setup requires a significant level of effort. If there were a way to migrate or import some features or have some preconfigured settings, it would greatly help with the initial setup. It takes three to four months as per standard operation.

We have engineers who are certified in the tools. We have a couple of product managers, but the main source of disruption, or at least delays, is the integration and dependency on other areas. For example, if we want to integrate the CMDB with the monitoring tools we already have in place for each of our different customers, it requires time and dependencies not only on the availability of people but also on the ability to make changes to the environments.

The ROI is very good. Although it's expensive, you can fully implement the recommendations from the various tools and dashboards and easily recover the investment within the first year.

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The cost will vary depending on the specific scenario, but it is not cheap.

You can easily maintain it once you get into a stable mode with IBM Turbonomic. The operations team that adopted the tool is getting a lot of value from it, making it easier for them to manage and consolidate their work. It doesn't ramp up your AppDV or resource needs but helps improve and optimize them. We are using fewer people now.

It has a lot of capabilities. We haven't encountered any scalability issues. The way we have implemented it has helped us easily incorporate new customer sets.

There weren't many people with the skills to implement and manage IBM Turbonomic, so we had to develop the team's expertise. However, once we overcame that hurdle, managing it became easier.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.