Savings Automator – General Availability

We are excited to announce the general availability of our automated cloud rate optimization feature called Savings Automator. Savings Automator can modify and exchange existing Amazon EC2 Convertible Reserved Instances (RIs), keeping your RI coverage optimized. Users can analyze recommendations before enabling automation, enable/disable automation at any time for any number of linked accounts, set budget and date constraints for purchases, and indicate their desired balance of commitment vs. savings. 

Learn more about Savings Automator in our Help Center documentation.

GCP Resources Event-Based Collection and Processing – Public Beta

As previously announced, we are now entering the public beta phase for event-based collection of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources. With this public beta release, our platform will now update GCP metadata in real time, ensuring that the platform always has the most current data in asset reports, Perspectives, and Policies. Customers who have enabled event-based collection will see their collection latency shrink from up to 12 hours to under 5 minutes. With this dramatic increase in data freshness, customers can now make decisions in real time, ensuring continuous alignment with organizational goals and objectives. 

All customers using GCP will have new GCP resources and the event-based collection configuration option. To enable event-based collection:

1. Navigate to Google Cloud --> Setup --> Accounts --> GCP Project

2. Select the circular arrows icon to the left of each project called ‘Event Streaming’

3. Run the script that displays in the dialogue box

The following new resources are available: 

• KMS Keyring 

• KMS CryptoKey 

• KMS CryptoKeyVersion 

• GCP VPN Gateway 

• GCP DNS Managed Zone 

• Google Cloud Functions 

• Committed Use Discount 

• KMS Keyring 

• KMS CryptoKey 

• KMS CryptoKeyVersion 

• GCP VPN Gateway 

• GCP DNS Managed Zone 

• Google Cloud Functions 

• Committed Use Discounts 

• GCP CloudRun 

• GCP CloudRouter 

• GCP Big Query Table 

• GCP Big Query Dataset 

Please update your GCP service account permissions to contain the permissions below. All customers using GCP can access these new resources regardless of whether they have enabled event-based collection, but all customers must update the permissions below for collection of any type to take place.  

<Cloudfunctions.functions.get, cloudfunctions.functions.list, cloudfunctions.locations.get, compute.commitments.get, compute.commitments.list, cloudkms.locations.list, cloudkms.cryptoKeys.list, cloudkms.cryptoKeys.get, cloudkms.keyRings.list, cloudkms.keyRings.get, cloudkms.cryptoKeyVersions.list, compute.vpnGateways.get, compute.vpnGateways.list, dns.managedZones.get, dns.managedZones.list, dns.resourceRecordSets.list, compute.routers.list, compute.routers.get, run.services.list, run.revisions.list, bigquery.tables.get, bigquery.tables.list, bigquery.datasets.get> 

New GCP Policy Condition and Action

We have added a new policy condition and action to our policy engine to help keep your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment optimized for cost.  

• Alert on expiring GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) – be alerted when your CUDs are nearing expiration. Send a notice to the appropriate stakeholder who can make the decision to purchase new CUDs. Ensure continuous coverage by setting up this policy today.

• Delete Google Compute Engine (GCE) Snapshots – create a policy that automatically deletes GCE Snapshots when they are too old to be useful. Save money on storage costs by keeping only current, relevant snapshots. This action is available when selecting the Compute Snapshot resource type. To use this policy action, you will need to add the following permission: compute.snapshots.delete 

AWS Account Owner ID Option in Interactive Reports

Customers can now specify if CloudHealth should use AWS Account Owner ID or AWS Account Name when generating Interactive Reports. (Support for Azure already existed.) By going to Setup > Admin > Settings, you can update the setting. The next time reports are generated, CloudHealth will update all values for AWS Account to the specified setting. The default setting will continue to be Account Name. Please note, this change will apply for all saved reports in all organizations.