CloudHealth (Broadcom)

Profile

CloudHealth, now operating as VMware Tanzu CloudHealth under Broadcom ownership, is a mature multi-cloud financial management platform serving organizations managing cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Delivered exclusively as a Software-as-a-Service offering, the platform provides unified visibility into cloud spending, resource optimization, governance automation, and security compliance monitoring. Recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Management Tools, CloudHealth serves organizations collectively managing approximately $24 billion in annual cloud spend. The platform addresses the complexity of tracking usage patterns, allocating costs accurately, and maintaining governance across disparate cloud ecosystems through comprehensive FinOps capabilities.

Focus

CloudHealth solves the fundamental challenge of managing cloud costs and operations across multiple cloud providers, on-premises data centers, and hybrid environments. The platform consolidates fragmented billing data into a single source of truth, enabling granular cost allocation and chargeback capabilities that assign cloud costs to business units, teams, projects, or customers. It provides actionable recommendations for resource optimization, including rightsizing, reserved instance purchases, and savings plan strategies. Policy-based governance and automation enforce best practices without manual intervention, automatically remediating security misconfigurations and terminating unused resources. The platform serves finance teams seeking cost accountability, operations teams focused on resource optimization, engineering teams tracking unit economics, and security teams managing compliance requirements.

Background

CloudHealth was founded in 2012 as CloudHealth Technologies, establishing early market presence as a pioneer in cloud cost management. VMware acquired the company in 2018, providing resources and market reach that expanded the platform's capabilities. Broadcom subsequently acquired VMware in November 2023 for approximately $61 billion, bringing CloudHealth into its infrastructure software portfolio. In May 2024, Broadcom appointed Arrow Electronics as the sole global provider of CloudHealth, shifting from direct sales to a channel-based distribution model. The platform remains actively maintained with continuous feature development, including a comprehensive redesign featuring AI-powered capabilities. Broadcom maintains product ownership and research responsibility while Arrow handles sales, marketing, and technical support globally.

Main features

Multi-cloud cost visibility and analysis

CloudHealth aggregates cloud cost and usage data from multiple sources through direct connectors that ingest billing data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports, Azure Service Principal connections or Enterprise Agreements, Google Cloud Platform billing exports, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The platform processes massive data volumes daily while maintaining accuracy, providing comprehensive visibility with daily granularity across time periods, cloud providers, accounts, services, and custom dimensions. Users can analyze costs using multiple metrics including blended, unblended, amortized, and effective costs. The Cost History Report enables filtering and drill-down into specific cost drivers, comparing actual spending against budgets and forecasts to identify optimization opportunities.

Dynamic business grouping and cost allocation

The Perspectives feature provides dynamic business groupings that allow different organizational units to view cost data according to their specific business context, enabling flexible grouping by cost center, business unit, application, environment, team, or custom dimensions without data duplication. The FlexOrgs hierarchy feature provides granular control over organizational structure and user permissions, allowing users to be assigned to multiple FlexOrgs with different permission levels. Cost reallocation rules redistribute indirect costs proportionally based on direct costs within defined Perspectives, enabling sophisticated chargeback models that accurately reflect how shared cloud resources should be attributed across business units, such as allocating data warehouse costs based on actual query volumes.

Policy-based governance and automation

CloudHealth's policy engine enables organizations to define governance rules that automatically enforce best practices and compliance standards through two operational modes: guidelines that alert users to violations without taking action, and guardrails that actively remediate violations by executing automated corrections. Policies support complex triggering conditions based on resource attributes, tagging, utilization patterns, cost, or security findings. When triggered, policies can execute automated actions including starting, stopping, resizing, or terminating infrastructure, sending notifications, creating tickets in incident management systems, or executing webhooks that invoke external systems. This automation reduces manual intervention while ensuring consistent enforcement of organizational standards across multi-cloud environments.