FlexReports Granular Permissions for Datasets – General Availability

FlexReports Granular Permissions are now generally available and will be applied by default for the AWS Cost & Usage Report, Azure Enterprise Agreement, and GCP BigQuery Billing Export FlexReport datasets.

Using FlexReport Granular Permissions, you can segregate access within your team and grant only the amount of access needed for certain users to perform actions on respective FlexReport datasets. Granular Permissions are supported by FlexOrgs to ensure the right access for the right users and enabled by FlexReports to extract and understand usage.

To get started with Granular Permissions, go to Setup > Admin > Roles > FlexReports > Data Sources.

Note: The granular permissions are applied to Administrator/Power/Standard users by default. For custom roles, please update the permissions. If you do not enable Granular Permissions for FlexReport datasets, FlexReport datasets and respective FlexReports will not be visible.

For more information, please visit our Help Center page.

Savings Automator – Public Beta

We are excited to announce the public beta for a new, automated cloud rate optimization feature called Savings Automator. Savings Automator will enable automatic implementation of recommendations for optimizing commitment-based discounts (e.g., AWS Reserved Instances, AWS Savings Plans). At public beta release, Savings Automator supports the automated exchange and modifications of AWS Convertible Reserved Instances (CRIs).

Savings Automator enables businesses to set up automatic implementation differently for specified payer accounts, and to view the actions that would be automatically implemented if they toggle on the “automate recommended actions” button. During setup, users can indicate how aggressive they are willing to be with their commitments in exchange for more savings to get relevant recommendations that align with their business guidelines. Users can also control the extent of automation independently for linked accounts based on permissions and budget limits for upfront payments. Please speak with your CloudHealth Technical Account Manager to set up Savings Automator, add budget and turn automation on.

New EC2 & RDS Rightsizing – Public Beta

We are announcing the public beta for new EC2 and RDS Rightsizing tools with full API availability. Based on a more robust Rightsizing engine, the new tools are more customizable to ensure that the recommendations align with your business needs. They also offer deeper insights into your utilization, provide additional flexibility to make recommendations more actionable, and have faster response times that allow analysis across all your teams that may have varying efficiency needs.

Both EC2 and RDS Rightsizing tools allow you to specify ranges of metrics utilization that you consider as efficient. These inputs are used to analyze which of your current instances are or are not efficient, and generate relevant resizing or termination recommendations accordingly. With API availability for both Rightsizing tools, you can programmatically set these efficiency targets and consume recommendations.

To access our new EC2 and RDS Rightsizing tools, go to Recommendations > Rightsizing > Rightsizing (New).

Kubernetes Resource Usage – Public Beta

We are announcing the addition of Resources Usage measures in Kubernetes Resources and Allocation Reports. The new usage data allows customers to get a holistic view of the consumption of Kubernetes clusters across different teams, organizations, and lines of business. This enables better understanding of utilization of cost drivers like CPU and Memory across business groupings.

Some key use cases which can be addressed by this feature are:

Which team requested resources but consistently consumed fewer resources?
Which container images are not running efficiently?
Which clusters are good candidates for optimization based on utilization?

To use these new measures, you must update the CloudHealth Agent. The updated agent will be collecting additional information and usage metrics from the Kubernetes Metrics Server (if available) in your environment. The changelog has more information about the updates and additional information we are collecting. Please follow the instructions specific to the installation method you used to update the agent:

Helm Chart: Please follow these instructions to update the chart
Manual Deployment: Setup -> Containers -> Select Any Cluster -> Follow instructions from “Collector Deployment Page”

Once you update to the latest agent and it can communicate with the Kubernetes metric server in your environment, the status will be reflected as “Active” within an hour. The status will be listed as “Inactive” if CloudHealth has not received usage data from the cluster after 2 hours.

Updated terminology in Kubernetes Reports

In order to drive consistency between CloudHealth Reports and Kubernetes terminology we are updating the below measures:

Available CPU hours → CPU Available hours
Available CPUs → CPU Available
Available Memory (GB) → Memory Available (GB)
Available Memory hours (GB*H) → Memory Available hours (GB*H)
Requested CPU hours → CPU Request hours
Requested CPUs → CPU Requests
Requested Memory (GB) → Memory Requests (GB)
Requested Memory hours (GB*H) → Memory Request hours (GB*H)
CPU Limit Hours → CPU Limit hours
Memory Limit Hours (GB*H) → Memory Limit hours (GB*H)

AWS IAM Policy Update – Action Required

CloudHealth will soon be collecting and processing EKS Node Groups and EKS Clusters as level two assets. Customers will be able to use EKS Node Group and EKS Cluster tags and metadata in perspectives and will see new Asset Reports. In order to prepare for these features, customers will need to update their IAM policy to contain the following:

eks:ListNodegroups
eks:DescribeNodegroup
eks:ListClusters
eks:DescribeCluster

Legacy Azure "Amortized" Report – Deprecation Coming Soon

We recently announced the migration to the new Cost Management APIs for our Azure Amortized Cost pipeline. With this migration, we released a new Azure Amortized Cost report. On January 2, 2023, we will be fully deprecating the old pipeline and the old report (currently titled “Amortized”). Prior to this date, all customers must update their Service Principal(s) to contain the EnrollmentReader permission.