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AWS Trusted Advisor vs Spacelift comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
AWS Trusted Advisor
Ranking in Cloud Management
16th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Spacelift
Ranking in Cloud Management
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Optimizes cloud strategies with security and cost insights
Trusted Advisor offers features that provide inside information for the entire account, including identifying security gaps and offering cost optimization insights. The key features include security recommendations, cost optimization, and various packages to choose from, depending on the size of the company. It is especially beneficial for larger companies, as the tool provides a comprehensive view of account security, open ports, buckets, and offers recommendations for protection.
Sudheer Kumar Jamjam - PeerSpot reviewer
Everything can be visibly managed, scheduling and state management features are pretty good
We've integrated it with source control management tools like GitLab and Bitbucket. The scheduling and state management features are pretty good using Spacelift. It integrates with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes for policies, but we haven't worked on the compliance part. Spacelift streamlines collaboration among our development and operations teams. We use it for CI/CD as well. It can handle automation strategies. Whenever you put your YAML files and integrate them with Spacelift, it will scan the code and show where you need to make changes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"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."
"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"I would give it a ten out of ten."
"The key features include security recommendations, cost optimization, and various packages to choose from, depending on the size of the company."
"AWS Trusted Advisor is a tool that we can use to optimize the AWS infrastructure cost."
"The cost optimization features are valuable."
"The Security Advisor is the most valuable feature. It instantly informs you about any system misconfigurations, and the best part is, it's completely free."
"Trusted Advisor scans the complete infrastructure within the account, providing a consolidated view of all services in use."
"I strongly recommend using Trusted Advisor due to its role in cybersecurity, providing cost-effective solutions compared to external companies."
"It is very stable."
"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."
"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."
"A valuable feature of Spacelift is that you can attach labels, and it is a modernized tool for infrastructure deployments. It is pull request-based, and you can see all the Terraform plan and apply logs on the pull request itself, which is not available across any other CI/CD tools."
"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."
"Knowing the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) makes it easier to use without issues."
 

Cons

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"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."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."
"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."
"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."
"Maybe if Trusted Advisor could also help us with IP address issues and the status of our VPCs, it would be beneficial."
"For EC2 instances, we need to install the AWS CloudWatch agent to get the memory metric because we don't have a by-default memory utilization graph on cost optimization."
"I'd like the solution to support clouds beyond AWS."
"The integration between Trusted Advisor and Security Hub sometimes lacks, and I need a way to ensure things come through there."
"Maybe adding more security rules would be great."
"Trusted Advisor currently scans the whole system, including development, staging, and QA environments, which increases costs."
"Cost is a significant factor that needs improvement. Reducing the cost would make it more beneficial for all users."
"Cost is a significant factor that needs improvement."
"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."
"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."
"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."
"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."
"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"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."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"Trusted Advisor offers various packages, with the most comprehensive costing $15,000 per month."
"It is a bit expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about AWS Trusted Advisor?
The Security Advisor is the most valuable feature. It instantly informs you about any system misconfigurations, and t...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Trusted Advisor?
The cost of Trusted Advisor is reasonable, though it can be further economized by allowing selective scanning, focusi...
What needs improvement with AWS Trusted Advisor?
Trusted Advisor currently scans the whole system, including development, staging, and QA environments, which increase...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?
I've never checked the pricing because I enjoy using it for free. Besides the notification feature, I haven't needed ...
What needs improvement with Spacelift?
There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, ...
What is your primary use case for Spacelift?
I use Spacelift to deploy my applications, particularly AWS applications and infrastructure to my personal AWS account.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Information Not Available
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