Update to the EC2 RI Optimizer -- Coming Soon

We are excited to announce that we have revamped our EC2 RI Optimizer! You can expect to see the new Optimizer live in the platform on Monday, March 12th. The new Optimizer not only improves usability, but has several new capabilities, including:

Purchase recommendations based on percentage RI coverage. This allows you to decide how much of your On-Demand usage you want to be covered by Reservations. Our best practice that we recommend is to have at least 70% of your On-Demand instances covered by Reservations.
The option to recommend purchases only for expiring RIs. If you don’t want to see recommendations for new RI purchases, but just want to understand which of your expiring RIs you should be re-buying, we now offer that as an option in the Optimizer.
Analysis Time Period: Now. Previously we offered the ability to run analysis on the last day, last 7 days, last 30 days, or calendar month. We have now added the ability to analyze the “Now” time period, which runs the analysis based on your current inventory of instances.
Additional columns for analysis. In the detailed recommendations, we’ve added several new columns to give you all the information you need to make an informed RI decision. This includes instance and RI counts before and after the purchase, costs before and after, normalized unit counts, and more.
Improved treatment of Size Flexible Reservations. The Optimizer will now group all instances within a Size Flexible family, and give you the option to expand and drill down into the recommendations for each individual instance size. Note that CloudHealth will recommend purchases that most closely matches your current usage.

All existing saved quotes will still be accessible to you in the new Optimizer.

DynamoDB Indirect Charges -- Update

We are updating the processing to correctly distribute costs for DynamoDB Subscription sign-up charges. These are currently combined in the DynamoDB - Unused Reserved Read Capacity and DynamoDB - Unused Reserved Write Capacity indirect charges. Going forward they will be distributed into their own indirect charges:

DynamoDB - Reserved Prepay Read Capacity: This is a new indirect cost representing initial signup charge for DynamoDB provisioned read throughput.
DynamoDB - Reserved Prepay Write Capacity: This is a new indirect cost representing initial signup charge for DynamoDB provisioned write throughput.

These changes will backfill for the past 13 months of cost history. If you wish to maintain a version of Cost History before the update goes into effect, we recommend that you export an offline CSV before end of day Monday, March 12th, when we expect this update to roll out.

RDS Size Flexible Reservations -- Amortization Support

We now support Size Flexible RDS Reservations in the RDS RI Amortization Report, categorized by both usage and by purchase. This gives you the ability to see the amortized RDS reservation cost by usage and by purchase with size flexible applications correctly accounted for.

With this change you can also view amortized cost per account. Previously, amortized costs were put into a synthetic account called “Blended.” When CloudHealth does not have a Cost and Usage Report for all accounts this report will retain previous behavior.

Update to Azure Virtual Machine Costs and Usage

A few weeks ago we updated the Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Cost and Usage Reports to include additional VM-related charges, such as network costs, that were not previously accounted for in CloudHealth. That change impacted the way we were computing some existing usage metrics (# VMs, # VMs by Usage, and # VM Hours).

As a result, we are updating the way that VM-specific usage metrics are computed -- they will now have numbers for only hardware costs. We are adding new metrics that have totals for all VM related assets included in the report (# Assets, # Assets by Usage, # Asset Hours).

If you previously saved a report with one of the following Y-axis metrics: # VMs by usage, # VM hours, or #VMs, it has now been renamed # Assets by usage, # Asset hours, or # Assets, respectively. However, the numbers in the report will stay the same. If you want these reports to only show VM metrics, you must update the saved reports to include the new metrics.