Update to Managing Customer Tenants in FlexOrgs

We’re pleased to announce an enhanced experience for our managed service providers to switch into end customer tenants. This new capability helps you more effectively manage your end customers by allowing you to maintain your existing privileges and have access to the organizations in an end customer tenant.

Update to Azure Reservation Charges - Coming Soon

In the next few weeks, we’ll be making two changes to the way reservation charges are reported for partner customers. First, we’ll begin reporting on all reservation charges for all supported Azure services (e.g. SQL and Cosmos DB), not just VMs. Second, reservation charges are currently reported when the monthly bill finalizes, but once this update is released you’ll start to see reservation charges when that charge was incurred during the month.

Policy Read API - General Availability

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of the Policy Read API. Today, we’re exposing Policy APIs to you and enabling you to embed CloudHealth directly into your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. This enhancement will help you drive continuous governance across financial management, operations, and security and compliance. The Policy Read API allows you to retrieve policy information and results. The API supports four endpoints and the following operations to enhance governance and visibility into policy violations:

Retrieve policy, policy block, and policy violation data for your policies in the CloudHealth Platform using the endpoints.
For Partners, retrieve policy, policy block, and policy violation data for your partner customers’ policies in the CloudHealth Platform. Limited to policies in the partner customer’s default organization.

Learn more about the Policy Read API in our API documentation.

Asset Support for Amazon Elasticsearch Reserved Instances

We’ve recently added collection and reporting for Elasticsearch Reserved Instances. This asset type is now available across the platform including in the Activity Feed, Perspectives, and Policies.

We’ve also updated the cost distribution of the Elasticsearch service. Previously, charges for Elasticsearch Reserved Instances were included in the ‘Elasticsearch - RI Prepay’ and ‘Elasticsearch - Other’ indirect service items. Now, the costs associated with Elasticsearch Reserved Instances are distributed into this direct service item:

Elasticsearch - RI Prepay

And the following indirect service items:

Elasticsearch - RI Unused
Elasticsearch - Other

We recommend that you update your cost reallocation rules for ‘Elasticsearch - RI Prepay’ and ‘Elasticsearch - Other’ indirect service items to adapt to this change.

Improved AWS IAM Access Validation

As you may already know, the CloudHealth Platform needs IAM permissions attached to its assumed role to collect and report essential data from your AWS environment. We used to validate this set of required permissions by making a few API calls to your AWS environment via the US-East-1 region. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have improved this validation process. Going forward, you’ll be able to select a region from the list for validation and have a more advanced control over accessible regions per account.

We’ll continue using US-East-1 as the default region for validation. You can change the region by navigating to Setup > Accounts > AWS > {Account_Name} > Edit and selecting a region from the Primary AWS Region Override dropdown under the Optional section.

New KPIs for AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances

To help you better understand your success with discounts such as Reserved Instances (RIs), and Savings Plans (SPs), we’re introducing new discount-related KPIs. Last month, we released ‘Coverage’ as a KPI, and today, we’re releasing two additional KPIs:

Savings. “EC2 Savings from RIs” and “EC2 Savings from SPs” - see how much you saved on EC2 usage with RIs and/or SPs, including the share from this usage of upfront fees, amortized.*
Discount Rate. “Discount Rate” from RIs and SPs - see what percentage of your usage is covered by discounts, and the effective blended discount rate.

These measures currently live in the CloudHealth AWS Savings Report. You can also see them in the Savings Plan Dashboard in a summary form - clicking on the summary rack will bring you into the appropriate Savings Report view to dig deeper. Users can also add widgets showing specific configurations of the Coverage, Savings, or Discount Rate. These KPIs also tie back into how commitments are measured and proposed in the Savings Plans Recommendations toolset. We’re looking forward to learning more about how you’re operationalizing these discount-related KPIs, and how CloudHealth can help.

Note:

The cost of unused RIs or unused SPs are not taken into account in these new KPIs because, by definition, those costs are not associated with usage, and how customers distribute, share, and chargeback unused costs will vary.
*The existing “EC2 Savings” measure (paired with “EC2 Opportunities”) represent a “charges” view (what was charged in this time period) and therefore do not take into account the amortization of upfront fees. At this time, these measures are still available and will be renamed in the future to reflect the difference.

New Azure Policy Reports

Last month, we announced support for Azure Policy with a new Azure Policy Assignment Asset Report. Today, we’re releasing the final two Azure Policy reports, the Azure Policy States Asset Report and the Azure Policy Governance Report.

The Azure Policy States Report gives you visibility into the compliance state for each individual resource. The Azure Policy Governance Report is a summary level view for all policy assignments across all subscriptions. You can use this report to drill further into filtered views of the underlying Policy Assignment or Policy State reports.

Update to Azure VM Rightsizing Algorithm

Over the last few weeks, a number of improvements were made to the Azure VM Rightsizing Report to account for non-supported configuration options and to be more consistent with our AWS solution. The following changes were made:

If one or more metrics for the source VM are unavailable, CloudHealth assumes that the missing metrics are 99% utilized in the source VM
The MaxDataDiskCount and MaxNetworkInterfaces are now taken into account
Prior to making a cross-family recommendation, if applicable, we also now validate the following settings will be available on the destination instance type: Accelerated Networking, Premium Disk, Encryption at Host, and RDMA

New GCP Budget Policy Condition

With the transition to GCP BigQuery, we have released a new condition for creating budget policies. This new policy condition will be using the Invoice Month total in BigQuery and will tie in with the total in the History Invoice. Moving forward, we recommend that all budget policies in GCP be created using this condition.

Upcoming Changes to GCP Cost Report Service Categories

Over the next week, we'll be making a number of improvements to the way we categorize costs in the GCP Cost History and History Invoice reports. This will cause some GCP Service Categories in these cost reports to be renamed or separated out further. The services that will be impacted are Google Maps, Stackdriver/Cloud Logging, Click to Deploy, Licensing (e.g. Bitnami, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks), and Cloud SQL.