VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth User Interface Changes – Coming Soon

In April, we will roll out changes to our platform user interface to reflect the new product name and brand. Key areas of the platform that will be updated include:

Login page
Top navigation
CloudHealth Academy relabeled as “Training Academy”
Mentions of CloudHealth in the UI (i.e., information banner)
Subscription and invitation emails
Our integration with other VMware Aria family products will be updated to reflect their new names: vRealize Operations will become VMware Aria Operations, and Wavefront will become VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Please note that the left-hand side of the login screen has already started to change to reflect these updates.

New Azure VM Rightsizing Engine – General Availability

We are excited to announce the general availability of new Azure VM Rightsizing. Built on a more robust engine, our new Azure VM Rightsizing feature generates recommendations in seconds, and offers up to 3 recommendations for each instance. Complete with a new user interface, this new rightsizing engine delivers cost and savings summaries, customizable efficiency targets for resource utilization, upsizing recommendations, and the ability to drill down into each instance to view usage. Data from our new rightsizing engine is available via a GraphQL API that enables you to programmatically set efficiency targets and consume recommendations.

Many additional enhancements are still to come. Classic Azure VM rightsizing tools will eventually be deprecated after all existing functionality is available in the new engine. Learn more about our new rightsizing engine in this Help Center article.

Alibaba Cloud – Public Beta

We are excited to announce the public beta of Alibaba Cloud support. CloudHealth extends multi-cloud management to Alibaba customers by providing visibility into cloud cost and usage, streamlining decision-making with custom reports and dashboards, and mapping costs back to business units or projects.

CloudHealth provides insights into Alibaba Cloud cost so you can view all your public cloud costs, including Alibaba, in a single platform. Features available in public beta include:

Dashboard: Cost and usage overview with historical cost segregated by service categories.
Cost History Report: Ability to slice-and-dice cost across Alibaba Cloud services, compartments, and Perspectives with cost drill down showing resource level cost details.
FlexReports: Build reports across various dimensions to perform granular analysis on cost, usage, and asset data.
Multi-Cloud Cost History Report: Alibaba Cloud is now included in this report, so you have a single point of reference across clouds.
Perspectives: Ability to create dynamic business groups based on resource tags, compartments, and derived assets.
Assets: Visibility into Alibaba compartments and a comprehensive list of assets (as derived from billing data).

Due to data protection challenges with cloud providers from the China region, Alibaba Cloud capabilities are enabled in the CloudHealth platform via a “Bring Your Own Data” approach, wherein you need to create a designated storage bucket associated with a non-China region and post the Alibaba Cloud bill downloaded/exported from Alibaba console periodically. CloudHealth will process the bills posted by you to enable cost use cases. The CloudHealth platform needs access to the storage bucket created by you, which is accomplished using the new “Data Connect” capability available under the “Admin” menu. For the Public Beta, only AWS S3 is supported as a storage location, and support for Alibaba Cloud native OSS buckets will be coming soon!

Learn more about Alibaba Cloud support in this Help Center article.

Kubernetes (request-based) Rightsizing – Public Beta

We are excited to announce the public beta release of Kubernetes (request-based) Rightsizing, built on our new rightsizing framework. This feature is currently available for users on AWS, and we plan to add support for more clouds as part of future enhancements. As part of this public beta, all customers have access to this feature, but customers will need to deploy a new version of the CloudHealth Kubernetes Agent on their clusters.

Kubernetes Rightsizing provides recommendations for changing container Requests based on usage of CPU and memory. Features include:

Custom Efficiency Targets: Users can customize these recommendations by setting specific targets for CPU and Memory. Users can choose to use CPU/Memory Averages or Maxes and set a desired range from 1% to 120% for each metric.
Filtering: Users can filter by cluster, namespace, or workload to drill down and look at a sub-set of resources.
FlexOrgs aware: Kubernetes Rightsizing Recommendations work with FlexOrgs, so users in sub-OUs can only see and act on clusters that they have permission for.

Ephemeral compute constructs (such as Kubernetes pods) create a lot of opportunities for rightsizing, but the sheer volume can be difficult to manage. Our Kubernetes rightsizing feature helps application developers determine what the appropriate CPU and Memory Request amounts are for their containers by giving a recommended range.

For the CCoE or FinOps team: export recommendations and deliver them to application owners for rightsizing.
For Application Owners: get recommended ranges for CPU and Memory to use as parameters for adjusting container Requests.
For Business leadership: as application owners lower Request thresholds to meet workload needs, fewer compute nodes will need to be provisioned, driving cloud costs down.

Learn more about Kubernetes Rightsizing in our Help Center article.

New Kubernetes Usage Reports for FlexOrgs – Private Beta

We are opening a private beta for two new Kubernetes usage reports that are visible at sub-organization level in CloudHealth FlexOrgs. Members of sub-organizations can now view Kubernetes usage in accounts that they are permissioned for. In tenants that are enabled for the private beta, you can access these reports by going to Reports -> Containers and selecting one of these two new reports:

Kubernetes Container Usage
Kubernetes Node Usage

The new reports are backed by FlexReports and can be accessed via the FlexReports API.

We’re currently opening these reports to a limited set of private beta customers to complete validation and testing. If you’re interested in participating, please contact your Technical Account Manager to determine eligibility.

Upcoming Deprecation – AWS CloudTrail Governance Report

The AWS CloudTrail report found under the Governance tab will be deprecated on March 15, 2023. This deprecation requires no action from customers and will cause zero downtime.

Update to FlexReports – Multiple Y-axes in Chart Preview

FlexReports "Chart Preview" now supports multiple Y-axes. Multiple Y-axes allow data from different datasets to be visualized together. This view illustrates correlations between multiple datasets with different magnitudes and helps interpret data more easily.

All Discount Automation Types Now Supported in AWS Cost History

We have updated the Cost Without Discounts dimension in the AWS Cost History Report to now support all discount automation credit types. You can use this measure to report on which services got the benefit of each specialized credit.

New Data Center Machine Tagging Policy

We have added a new policy condition for alerting on the tagging configuration for your Data Center VMs. This is available by going to the Data Center Machine resource type within the policy editor. You can use this policy to identify VMs that are missing tags.

Agent Support for arm64 Processors

We are releasing additional architecture support for Linux instances using arm64 processors to the CloudHealth Agent. This expands our agent offering to provide visibility into both arm64 and amd64-based infrastructure. Learn more about support for arm64 and new agent version (v28) in this Help Center article. For more information, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager.

New GCP Assets

The GCP SQL Instances and Secret Manager Secrets assets now support event-based collection and processing. The YAML file found here contains the latest set of permissions for all new and upcoming GCP resources. We recommend that customers take the latest version of this YAML each time new GCP resources are released.

Support for AWS Melbourne Region

Data from the new AWS Melbourne Region (ap-southeast-4) is now supported in the platform. Customers will see costs and assets from this region properly allocated.