Azure Tier 2 Billing Support — Private Beta

We are excited to announce the private beta of Azure Tier 2 Billing Support. With this release, we are providing Tier 2 resellers with the same features and functionality as we are for our current CSP Direct partners.

The feature does require a Tier 1 partner to be involved in the initial CloudHealth configuration, but beyond that the Tier 2 reseller has the ability to provide cost visibility, cost optimization, and governance to their customers.

If you would like to participate in this private beta, please contact cht-azure_reseller_beta@vmware.com.

Updates to Amazon EC2 Rightsizing

Based on your feedback, we have made a few changes to make the CloudHealth Amazon EC2 Rightsizing Recommendations even better. If Memory or Disk metrics for the source instance are unavailable, CloudHealth will ensure that the target instance has at least as much or more memory and disk capacity as the source instance. In other words, missing Memory and/or Disk usage data will no longer identify instances as having underutilized Memory and/or Disk.

Coming Soon: Next week, we will introduce a new enhancement to our EC2 Rightsizing engine that will enable you to make well-informed decisions and optimize your EC2 inventory which is thoroughly covered by reservations or discounted pricing. In such cases, we will find the smallest instance that could fit the workload of your instance and will suggest a resize option. We will let you drive the reservation optimizations and make the best decisions to maximize your ROI.

Learn more about Amazon EC2 Rightsizing in this Help Center article.

Updates to EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger Monthly Savings

We’ve made a few changes to the information provided in the Amazon EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger around monthly savings. We broke monthly savings into two separate items:

Monthly Savings (default) - Average monthly savings over the lifetime of new reservations. This value is added to the Recommendation Summary and available in the table by default.
First Month Savings (optional) - Savings in the first month of the new reservations. This field is helpful when looking at how long it will take to recoup your additional True Up Cost. Note: This will be the same as Monthly Savings for No Upfront reservations.

Update to AWS Amortization Report

With the introduction of the new AWS Amortization Report earlier this year, we removed the tabular rollup of direct, indirect, amortized, and total costs for the default view of the report. Back by popular demand, we’ve re-added this functionality so you are able to see this rollup in conjunction with amortization for all AWS services.

Updated Support for Amazon M5, R5, and Z1d Instances

AWS recently announced the latest updates to the EC2 Instance family tree: M5 and R5 instance types in new sizes. Furthermore, AWS announced support for RDS for Oracle for the Z1d instance family. These new sizes and instances are now supported across the platform including cost and usage reports, Reserved Instance recommendations, amortization, Perspectives, rightsizing, and policies.

Update to Containers Cost History Report

The Containers Cost History Report provides container cost visibility by cluster, namespace, or any custom label. This provides the insight necessary to perform chargebacks or show backs to the business. To that end, we are happy to announce that the Containers Cost History Report now supports 7 months of historical container cost distribution in the monthly time interval. This allows teams to have a wider historical view of their containers costs.