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May202318

Partner | Updates to Partner Billing Rules for Azure MCA Channel Customers

MSP partners can now create partner billing rules using Amortized Cost for Azure Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) accounts. Prior to this, partners could only create billing rules on the total cost for Azure MCA agreements. Now, billing rules can be applied to both Total Cost and Amortized Cost.

Tag Curation – General Availability

We are excited to announce the general availability of Tag Curation in VMware Aria Cost Tag Management! These updates give users the ability to enable or disable cloud-native tags (from AWS, Azure, GCP) and Aria Cost tags in the VMware Aria Cost platform. Only enabled tags will be visible when building new perspectives and policies, thus eliminating unnecessary noise, and simplifying the process to build them.

All existing perspectives and policies will continue to work as they have previously, even if they contain disabled tags. Tags can be enabled/disabled one-at-a-time or in bulk using a new bulk action toggle that disables all unused tags. We have also added a “Last Updated” column, which contains the date and time a Tag Key was last updated so you can more easily see how frequently it is used.

With this update, users can also drill down into the unique assets that contain each tag. Upon rollout:

  • All tags currently in use will be enabled by default. (“In use” means used in a report, perspective, or policy.)

  • Any new tag that comes into the platform from cloud-native consoles will be enabled by default for one year; if they are not used after one year they will be automatically disabled.

  • It may take up to 1 hour for new tags from cloud-native consoles to appear in the platform. 

For more information on Tag Curation features in Tag Management, please refer to this VMware Docs article.

Amazon OpenSearch Rightsizing – General Availability

We are pleased to announce the General Availability of our new Amazon OpenSearch Rightsizing Recommendations. With Amazon OpenSearch Service, you can search, analyze, visualize, and secure up to petabytes of text and unstructured data for numerous use cases including log analytics, application search, enterprise search, and more.

Built on our new rightsizing engine, our new OpenSearch Rightsizing feature generates recommendations in seconds, and offers up to 3 recommendations for each cluster. Complete with a new user interface, this feature delivers:

  • Cost and savings summaries

  • Upsizing recommendations

  • Customizable efficiency targets for CPU and JVM Memory

  • Ability to drill down into each master/data node cluster 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. Learn more about OpenSearch Rightsizing in this VMware Docs article and our GraphQL API doc.

Kubernetes Request Rightsizing for Azure – General Availability

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Kubernetes Request Rightsizing for Azure. Built on our new rightsizing framework, Kubernetes Rightsizing provides recommendations for changing container requests based on usage of CPU and memory.

GraphQL APIs are available for our Kubernetes rightsizing tools for both AWS and Azure. These enable you to programmatically set efficiency targets and consume recommendations. Learn more about our new rightsizing engine in our GraphQL API doc.

Update to Kubernetes Request Rightsizing – Group and Filter by Perspectives

We have added the ability to group and filter Kubernetes rightsizing recommendations by Perspective groups, making it easier for users to consume rightsizing recommendations relevant to them. With this enhancement, users can:

  • Filter Kubernetes rightsizing reports by Perspective groups

  • Group Kubernetes rightsizing recommendations by Perspective groups

This capability is available for both of our AWS and Azure Kubernetes Request Rightsizing.

Update to Kubernetes Usage Reports for FlexOrgs Public Beta

Based on customer feedback, we have added several measures to our new Kubernetes usage FlexReports, which are currently in public beta. The following categories have been added to the Kubernetes Containers Usage Report:

  • Workload Name

  • Workload Type

  • Container Image

  • Cloud Account ID

We also added the following measures to the Y-Axis in the Kubernetes Containers Usage Report:

  • Percentage CPU Utilization

  • Percentage Memory Utilization

The following measures were added to the Y-Axis in the Kubernetes Node Usage Report:

  • Percentage CPU Used (requested CPU / allocatable CPU)

  • Percentage CPU Utilization (CPU used / requested CPU)

  • Percentage Memory Used (requested Memory / allocatable Memory)

  • Percentage Memory Utilization (Memory used / requested Memory)

Update to Kubernetes Collector Agent

To enhance the experience when using our Kubernetes Collector Agent, we are changing the base image used in our collector agent from Alpine Linux to PhotonOS. With this change, VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth can provide faster security fixes and enhanced support.

You will notice these adjustments in the Helm Chart version:

  • Version: 2.0.12 --> 3.0.0

  • appVersion: 3.2.5 --> 4.0.0

On June 15, 2023, all agent versions older than 1172 will be deprecated from Aria Cost Docker Hub. To determine your current version, you can use this command:

kubectl describe deployment/cloudhealth-collector | grep Image Output:
   Image: 1325

Please follow the specific instructions to the installation method you used to update the agent:

  • Helm Chart: follow these instructions to update the chart

  • Manual Deployment: Setup -> Containers -> Select Any Cluster -> Follow instructions from “Collector Deployment Page”

Update to Perspectives – Changes to Group Ordering

We’ve changed the way groups are ordered within a Dynamic Group Block (DGB) in our Perspective builder. Perspective groups within a DGB are now ordered without considering case (previously this was case-sensitive).

For example, groups “development” and “Development” will now be ordered closely together. This will help to streamline the experience when discovering and merging similar groups.

Support for New Assets

We have added the following new assets to the platform. These assets will have their own asset report, direct cost categorization, policies, and be usable in Perspectives.

AWS: ElastiCache Replication Groups

Customers will need to add one of these two permissions to their IAM role: elasticache:DescribeReplicationGroups or elasticache:*


Microsoft Azure: Customers will receive the new Azure assets without taking any action.

  • Azure Machine Learning Compute Workspace

  • Azure Container Registry

  • Azure AVS Virtual Machine

  • Azure AVS Datastore

  • Azure AVS Cluster

Google Cloud Platform: GCP BigTable Backup

Customers will need to add the bigtable.backups.get and bigtable.backups.list permissions to their IAM policy.

Currency Conversion for Azure Amortized Cost

Customers can now convert currency for Azure amortized cost throughout the platform. This applies to FlexReports, standard reports like the Amortized Cost report, and billing rules.

Users can change the currency by navigating to Setup --> Admin --> Settings and choosing the desired currency from the dropdown menu.