Update to Default AWS Amortization Reports

We are pleased to announce an enhancement to our default amortization reports for Amazon Reservations. The default for all AWS amortization reports now have Months on the x-axis categorized by Reservation Type to deliver a consistent experience as you navigate your amortization costs, relate them to your Cost History Report, or add them to a custom dashboard!

These updates were implemented for the following default amortization reports:

Coming Soon -- AWS GovCloud Support in Partner Generated Billing

We’re happy to announce that we will soon be releasing support for AWS GovCloud accounts in our billing solution for partners. This functionality will allow partners to bill customers more accurately by associating GovCloud RIs to the related commercial account. The current release will allow linking the accounts together via an easy-to-use API with a GUI planned for a future release. Watch apidocs.cloudhealthtech.com for more details on the feature coming soon.

Coming Soon -- BigQuery Billing Export for Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides two ways to export your billing data. Currently, CloudHealth supports billing data via CSV exports only. Over the coming months we plan to add support for BigQuery billing exports as well. You will get a richer data set and your billing history will start from the day BigQuery is turned on. BigQuery provides more granular details and is refreshed every 4 hours. We plan to use these details to get more accurate and detailed costs. Please note, adding BigQuery exports will only increase your spend by a few cents every month. For example, a BigQuery Table with 10GB of storage, 1GB of streaming inserts and 1TB of queries will cost $0.25 per month ($3 per year).

To learn how to enable billing export to BigQuery, view this Google Cloud article.

Coming Soon -- Improvements to EMR Cluster and Instance Associations in Perspectives

In the next few days, we will be introducing an improvement to our EMR asset collection and allocation within Perspectives.

With our prior design, we associated an EC2 Instance with an EMR Cluster solely through the EMR Cluster Instance. As the EMR Cluster Instance can be a short-lived asset, there was a potential for our collection process (which can be simplified to be thought of as the API calls made to AWS) to "miss" the EMR Cluster Instances. If this occurred, the link was not created in our system between EMR Clusters and EC2 Instances, thus those "orphaned" EC2 Instances would not be grouped with their EMR Cluster in Perspectives.With our new design, we can also derive EC2 Instances and EMR Cluster associations via the "aws:elasticmapreduce:job-flow-id" system tag, with the expectation being more reliable associations made between Instance and Cluster.

We also plan to backfill collection of terminated EMR Clusters and Cluster Instances. This may result in slight changes in your EMR reports. You may also see a temporary increase in AWS calls made to EMR assets during this time; we will attempt to mitigate rate-limiting by staggering the runtime of these calls against our normal AWS API calls.

Reminder -- Cost Allocation by DBR Tags Coming Soon

We are working on a new approach to allocating costs for your taggable AWS services that are currently marked as Indirect Costs in the CloudHealth Platform. This will enable us to rapidly add support for new assets once they are introduced and become taggable. We will be using the tags and resource ID in your Detailed Billing Report (DBR) to automatically allocate costs for these services to the appropriate Perspective groups. Please enable all the tags in your DBR that you use for Perspectives.

Amazon AppStream
Amazon Cloud Directory
Amazon CloudSearch
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (ELB v2)
Amazon Glacier
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
Amazon Machine Learning
Amazon Route 53 (Health Check)
Amazon SageMaker (Training Job)
Amazon Simple Queue Service
AWS Direct Connect
AWS Key Management Service
AWS CodeBuild

Learn more about activating user-defined cost allocation tags in this AWS Documentation article.