AWS Cost Management [EOL] vs Densify comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Densify are both solutions in the Cloud Cost Management category. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Densify users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS Cost Management [EOL] and Densify based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Cost Management Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Cost Management

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery

Advisory System Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation

It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.

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RANJAN KUMAR

DevOps Engineer at ZoomOps Technology

Helps to set cost thresholds and receive alerts if the actual cost exceeds them

We regularly check the status of services to identify any unnecessary or unexpected costs. We utilize the billing dashboard in AWS to monitor daily costs and assess any significant increases. For instance, if our daily AWS expenses usually amount to $1,000 for running a hundred instances, and suddenly it spikes to $1,500, we investigate the reasons behind the increase. We scrutinize detailed reports, identify the areas and services contributing to the rise, and inform our manager. The dashboard overview in AWS Cost Explorer provides a high-level summary of our expenses, covering databases. This includes total costs, daily costs, and a breakdown by services. AWS Cost Explorer offers visualization tools like line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. These visualizations assist us in quickly understanding expenditures, enabling us to pinpoint areas that might need attention. The tool allows the creation of custom reports by selecting and configuring filtering and grouping options. Custom reports include a data range selector, making it easy to analyze expenses for specific periods such as daily, monthly, or custom durations. The budget feature is client-dependent. Before creating any services, we engage with our client to understand their requirements, such as the number of instances, CPU, and memory needed. Subsequently, we create a budgeting tool in servers based on these specifications. Our team configures custom notifications to alert us when actual costs or usage exceed predefined thresholds. These alerts can be sent via email or integrated with Simple Notification Service. I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.

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Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at Kyndryl

Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution

I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."

"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."

"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"With the cost management tool, clients can optimize fine tuning their consumption."

"The product provides the ability to set cost limits and budgets for a set of resources on the network."

"All of the reporting features are very good, as they allow us to track monthly expenses and send relevant emails."

"The budgeting tool of AWS Cost Management is the most valuable feature."

"The tool's cost management feature provides a comprehensive view of AWS costs, allowing us to plan and make cost-effective decisions. With AWS Cost Explorer, we can perform cost planning, generate recommendations, and provide clients with suggestions for resizing. This feature includes data filtering and protection, offering users insights into spending patterns through AWS spending patterns and planning tools. The product is easy to learn."

"I like the recommendation we get from AWS Cost Management to use a particular image or VM type."

"AWS Cost Management is good for providing in-depth information in one place."

"The initial setup was straightforward. It's not complex at all."

More AWS Cost Management [EOL] pros

"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."

"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."

"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."

"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."

"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."

"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."

"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."

More Densify pros

Cons

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

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

"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 as well."

"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"This program is not very scalable."

"There could be an option to build custom dashboards for the platform."

"We need finer-grained control over the roles and policies for users, specifying their permissions as to what they can look at."

"I would like to see AWS Cost Management be more precise in their calculations."

"Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or downloading data."

"The solution needs to improve the communication mechanism available to the stakeholders."

"The solution needs to have its own dashboard for seeing details on it. It should be customizable as well so I have the ability to pull up the information I need to see and have it in one place for my reference. I should just be able to click and see everything I need in one step."

"AWS Cost Management has fewer features compared to Azure Cost Management."

More AWS Cost Management [EOL] cons

"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."

"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."

"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."

"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."

"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"We get AWS Cost Management for free because we use AWS services."

"The product is affordable."

"We have signed a long-term contract with AWS. There are different service levels that will determine the level of support you have."

"The tool's pricing depends on our services."

"AWS Cost Management is free to use."

"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."

"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

University

Manufacturing Company

26%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Cost Management?

The tool's cost management feature provides a comprehensive view of AWS costs, allowing us to plan and make cost-effe...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Cost Management?

The tool's pricing depends on our services.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Cost Management?

Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or d...

See all answers

What do you like most about Densify?

The solution's tech support is excellent.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Densify?

Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Densify?

We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 19% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

No data available

Cloudability vs Densify

Compared 36% of the time

Intel Granulate vs Densify

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Densify

Compared 15% of the time

More Densify Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

January 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Cost Management [EOL]

February 2025

Download AWS Cost Management [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Densify

February 2025

Download Densify product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Amazon Cost Management

No data available

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Demo not available

Densify

Overview

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

AWS Cost Management tools give you visibility into your AWS costs and usage. There are a range of AWS Cost Management tools to help you access, organize, understand, control, and optimize your costs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

Densify works by:

Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.
Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.
Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

Densify Features

Densify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Integration with management and provisioning systems
Machine learning-based analytics
Automated resource optimization
App owner collaboration
Tailored efficiency reports
Observability
Controllability
Capacity optimization
Policy driven, automated governance
VM placement
Predictive analytics

Densify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Densify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.

Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.

Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.

Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.

Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.

A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.

Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.

Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.

Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

Densify

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Cost Management

January 2025

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