Cloudability : What's new in 2024

Key Highlights

• Granular Visibility : Allocate shared costs to specific Kubernetes namespaces, providing transparency for application owners and cost centers

• New Metrics : View allocated shared costs in the UI with metrics such as Shared Cost , Network Shared , and Memory Shared among others

• Flexible Rules : Define and manage shared cost allocation rules for organization-wide or cluster-specific configurations

Start Date : Shared costs will be calculated only from the feature launch date. Queries before this date will display empty results in the Shared Cost column.

Rule Behavior :

• Rules apply to future dates (in UTC) and are not retroactive

• Updates or deletions take effect on their scheduled date

• Multiple rules work in a union relationship across namespace

For detailed configuration steps and clarifications, refer to Help Center.

Key Capabilities

• Granular cost tracking : Gain visibility into cost and usage metrics at pod level

• Hierarchical navigation : Seamlessly explore from Cluster → Namespace → Workloads → Pods and containers

• Detailed insights : Understand cost allocation and resource utilization with unprecedented depth
  

How this feature can help you

This release enables IBM Cloud customers to:

• Allocate IBM Cloud costs back to business based on specific rules, leveraging Cloudability business dimensions automatically.

• Analyze their IBM Cloud spend and improve team ownership by leveraging resource-level analytics, interactive multi-cloud dashboards, and personalized views.

• Drive financial accountability by setting up IBM Cloud budgets and event notifications.

How to manage your IBM Cloud spend

IBM Cloud customers can start their cost management journey by adding credentials for their account, following the instructions on Connect IBM Cloud . Cloudability will ingest IBM Cloud data of the current month once your credentials are validated. For additional historical data ingestion, complete these steps and then reach out to the Apptio Support team. Check the API documentation for programmatic access to manage IBM Cloud credentials. Join the conversation on the Apptio Community for more information.

More information about this release

In this release, we’ve also added additional custom tags specific to IBM Cloud, which can be used as additional dimension for reporting:

• Resource Group Name: cldy:ibm:resourcegroupname

• Resource Group ID: cldy:ibm:resourcegroupid

• ClusterID: cldy:ibm:clusterid

• Plan ID: cldy:ibm:planid

• Consumer ID: cldy:ibm:consumerid

• Instance Name as ‘Resource Name’

With this GA launch, the spend managed by IBM Cloud in Cloudability will be included in your Monitored Costs, and will be subject to your contracted Monitored Cost Limit.

Where to find the new functionality

No additional setup is required to start receiving these recommendations as long as Cloudability is correctly Connected to Amazon Web Services.

For using the new feature, follow the steps:

1. From Cloudability home, navigate to Optimize menu and select Rightsizing.

2. Select the AWS tab on the Rightsizing page and select the S3 sub-tab. Rightsizing recommendations for Glacier Instant Retrieval will be present in the list of recommendations if they exist and are not being filtered out.

How this feature can help you

Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes you can choose from, based on the performance, data access, resiliency, and cost requirements of your workloads. In order to provide rightsizing recommendations for the lowest cost storage across different access patterns, recommendations will now be provided for the Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class in additional to the other classes currently supported by Cloudability. The Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class is typically used for archive data that needs immediate access.

Where to find these metrics

These new metrics are available within Cloudability reports and dashboards and Apptio BI.

• Estimated Carbon Emissions (MTCO2e): This metric captures the estimated carbon emissions in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.

• Power Consumed (kWh): This metric captures the power consumed in kilo watt hours.

These metrics are available at a resource level for the supported services.

You should be able to use this with your existing configurations of views, business mappings, account groups or tag mappings. These are also available via exports and Cloudability APIs.

Steps to use these metrics

We have configured a default dashboard within Cloudability to get started under All Dashboards called Sample Cloud Sustainability Dashboard .

For using the cloud sustainability metrics:

1. Navigate to Cloudability Home.

2. Click New report/ Add Widget.

3. Under Cloudability metrics section, scroll to Sustainability category.

4. Select metrics.

This feature allows you to reprocess your data, without relying on Support or Customer Success teams. Compared to the request-based process, this feature offers faster turnaround time, eliminates manual steps, enhances transparency for user requests, and improves the overall experience.

With this release, we have also addressed a critical issue where the reprocessed data was not immediately reflected in Reports after job completion, causing delays in viewing updated information. Now, after the job is completed you can query the reprocessed data in Reports immediately. Additionally, the Job Status tab displays the job completion time and the Reason field.

During the Beta, we received feedback on some user experience and product gaps from customers exporting their Cloud Data from Cloudability (or via CDI) to Costing & Planning . Therefore, we decided to put this feature on hold for customers using Cloudability or CDI to Costing & Planning integration, however it will be available to customers who only have Cloudability. We are actively working on enhancing the experience and expect to launch the improved feature early next year. Cloudability customers with Costing & Planning who had access during the Beta phase will continue to retain that access

The feature is not enabled by default as this is an Opt-in feature. Reach out to Support Team to get access to the feature.

More information about the feature

The feature, when enabled, can be accessed by navigating to  Organize  >  Data Reprocess in Cloudability

For Costing & Planning customers with  Cloudability or CDI: The feature is on hold . Refer to  Data Reprocess for Cloudability - Costing & Planning users .

The best practices for maximizing the IBM TechXchange experience are listed below.

• Use and bookmark this new homepage for the Apptio topic groups.

• Access the topic group that is relevant to your needs; Some of the topic groups with which you are familiar have been combined into new topic groups.

• Apptio : Costing Essentials, Costing Standard (CT-Foundation), Apptio Planning (ITP/ITFMF), Billing (Billing Standard), Benchmarking (Benchmarking), ServiceNow Integration

• Cloudability : Cloudability Financial Planning, Cloudability TotalCost, Apptio Turbonomic Integration

• ttps://community.ibm.com/community/user/apptio/communities/community-home?communitykey=55a3712d-1835-4ec2-bcd7-603e88cd9dd2

• Platform : Apptio BI, ATUM, Automated Data Management, DataLink, Frontdoor, TBM Studio

• Apptio for All

• Once you are in your topic group, read and contribute to all the usual content such as quick links, discussions, questions, and blogs.

• Check out these resources on how to navigate and utilize community.

• Start submitting Requests for Enhancements on IBM Ideas .

  • IBM uses a unified ideas portal at  ideas.ibm.com  for you to raise ideas against all products. As of today, that list has expanded to include the products recently acquired from Apptio. Ideas submitted prior to the acquisition will be made available to product teams and may be added to the portal at a future date to ensure continuity.

Contact the community team at our new email,  support@communitysite.ibm.com with any questions or needs.

• Ingest Datadog, Databricks, Snowflake and MongoDB billing data via direct connectors and other vendors using FOCUS-compatible exports.

• Allocate these costs back to the business based on their specific rules, leveraging the tag mapping, account groups and business mapping capabilities.

• Analyze this spend and improve team ownership with interactive multi-cloud dashboards and personalized views.

• Drive financial accountability by setting up budgets and event notifications.

FOCUS ingress

Cloudability customers can now gain flexibility by importing costs and usage data from any data sources or additional vendors that are not yet supported via direct connectors. The billing data needs to be converted into the FOCUS format and uploaded into AWS, Azure or GCP storage accounts. Once the credentialing process is validated, customers will be able to report on this additional spend and allocate it back to the business.

Start Managing your Third-Party Vendor Spend today

To enable the “Available Mbytes” memory metrics for consumption, refer to Important utilization metrics and how to leverage memory data.

1. From Cloudability , navigate to the Optimize menu, and then select Rightsizing .

2. Select the AWS tab on the Rightsizing page which defaults to EC2 .

Available memory metrics are displayed on a graph in the details pane of the rightsizing recommendation.

AWS has multiple options available for inclusion of memory metrics in the CloudWatch agent. Although support had already been available to consume memory metrics for Windows machines using the “ % Committed Bytes In Use ” metric, some customers had already configured the “Available Mbytes” metric and therefore were not seeing memory metrics in their rightsizing recommendations. In additional to providing more flexibility for customers, “Available Mbytes” is actually a more precise memory metric because it directly represents how much RAM is free as opposed to the “ % Committed Bytes In Use ” metric that represents both physical memory and virtual memory and therefore has the potential to be the lesser accurate assessment.

Earlier, the Top Count Reduction option when selected would filter recommendations displaying an instance count reduction, if they exist, for the current instance type. The other recommendation options for an instance, if they exist, will display in the details pane as usual after the top recommendation. This allows an easy and quick way to show cost savings achieved by reducing the number of instances in a compute group without making other changes.

Where to find this new functionality

1. In the Cloudability primary navigation menu, navigate to Optimize and select Rightsizing .

2. Select the AWS or GCP tab on the Rightsizing page and navigate to the compute group sub-tab ( EC2 ASG or GCE MIG ).

3. Select the Options drop-down menu, and select Top Count Reduction to filter the recommendations.

More information about this release

There was already functionality available for customers to filter compute group recommendations so that only ones with count reductions were displayed. However, this still required more thought and effort to switch instance types when the recommendations called for it. This new feature filters recommendations to present only those instances where the instance type remains unchanged but an instance count reduction is suggested as the leading recommendation. This enables clients to swiftly identify and capitalize on "low hanging fruit" savings, which necessitate only a reduction in the compute group's instance count. These recommendations are also displayed as the top recommendation for ease of use.

How this feature can help you

This release addresses the unique needs of our Middle-East region based clients, ensuring their data remains within the regional boundaries. By localizing our services, we aim to empower organizations to bolster their compliance efforts and align with the guidelines regarding cloud cost management data.

More information about the release

The launch of hosting  Cloudability in the Middle East region holds great significance for our customers operating within this region. It provides a reliable and compliant cloud cost management solution that prioritizes data residency, enhances data privacy, and aligns with data protection guidelines.

Key Highlights

• Share Custom Dashboards: Users can now share their custom dashboards internally with their entire organization or specific team members, allowing for broader distribution of insights.

• Dashboard Permissions: Fine-tune access control by assigning one of the following roles:

  • Editor: Can modify the dashboard and manage sharing permissions.

  • Viewer: Has view-only access, with no ability to edit or share the dashboard.

• Starring and Favorites: Users can mark dashboards as favorites, making them easily accessible from a dropdown list. Starred dashboards appear at the top of the list, sorted alphabetically for quick access.

• Improved Collaboration: Facilitate seamless teamwork by enabling colleagues to contribute to shared dashboards, whether through editing or viewing. This ensures that everyone has access to the most up-to-date insights. While Viewers cannot filter or move widgets on the dashboard, they can use the "Save As Dashboard" option to create a new dashboard based on the original, allowing them to explore the data and customize it to their needs.

How to Get Started

1. Create a Dashboard: Build a custom dashboard by adding key metrics and widgets that meet your needs.

1. Share: Use the dashboard sharing option to grant access to the entire organization or specific team members, assigning appropriate roles.

1. Manage Permissions: Control and update who can view, edit, or manage the dashboard using intuitive settings.

This feature simplifies the sharing of critical container metrics, making insights more accessible and actionable across teams. By enhancing collaboration, teams can drive better decision-making and ensure everyone is aligned on key container data.

What’s new in this release

This dimension represents the name that is assigned to GCP resources, such as VM instance name, disk name, or a database name. This detail matches with what users see in the GCP console when interacting with resources and aligns with the Global Resource Name column within GCP Resource Level Billing. This is the first of several releases that will serve as foundational updates to our support for commitment-based discounts.

Benefits to users

Cost attribution for resources : Users can immediately associate costs with their infrastructure.

User-friendly reports and dashboards : Users will have more clarity in reporting, removing the need to parse out unnecessary details like full API paths.

What’s new in this release

• Consolidated Commitment Portfolio : The "Reservation Portfolio" and "RI Planner" pages are updated to "Commitment Portfolio" and "Commitment Recommendations" respectively to reflect vendor-agnostic nomenclature. Additionally, support for spend-based commitments are now consolidated under vendor in the single portfolio page with the commitment pages reorganized together under Optimize .

• AWS & Azure Savings Plans Portfolio Enhancements : The table and KPIs are updated, and the details panel is added to match their reserved instance counterparts.

• GCP Portfolio Enhancements : “All Commitments” and “All Compute” pages are now added to convey performance at an aggregate level. Updated KPIs on the resource-based Compute CUDs portfolio page now match GCP Compute Flex CUDs. Finally, grouped and ungrouped tables convey ownership and how sharing impacts performance.

This is the first of several releases that will serve as foundational updates to our support for commitment-based discounts. For more information about commitments, see Getting started with Commitment Portfolio . Join in the discussion in our Community announcement .

What is Efficiency Score (Usage)

Efficiency Score (Usage) is calculated by comparing the cost of actively consumed resources (usage) to the total cost of reserved resources (provisioned or allocated). This score helps teams assess how effectively reserved resources are being utilized and highlights inefficiencies such as over-provisioning, or underutilization. A higher score indicates better resource efficiency, while a lower score reveals areas for potential optimization.

This KPI is designed to provide teams with deeper insights into their resource utilization, supporting decisions around resource allocation, rightsizing, and optimization strategies.

How this feature can help you

This release enables IBM Cloud customers to:

• Allocate IBM Cloud costs back to business based on specific rules, leveraging Cloudability business dimensions automatically.

• Analyze their IBM Cloud spend and improve team ownership by leveraging resource-level analytics, interactive multi-cloud dashboards, and personalized views.

• Drive financial accountability by setting up IBM Cloud budgets and event notifications.

How to manage your IBM Cloud spend

IBM Cloud customers can start their cost management journey by adding credentials for their account, following the instructions on Connect IBM Cloud . Cloudability will ingest IBM Cloud data of the current month once your credentials are validated. For additional data ingestion, reach out to the Apptio team. Check the API documentation for programmatic access to manage IBM Cloud credentials. Join the conversation on the Apptio Community for more information.

You will not be charged for IBM Cloud managed cloud spend during the Deta period. However, the spend managed by IBM Cloud in Cloudability will be included in your Monitored Costs post GA launch and will be subject to your contracted Monitored Cost Limit. Currently, the GA launch is scheduled for November 15, 2024 and subject to change to a later date.

Before this release, Workload Planning only supported few GPU instances across vendors and did not offer visibility into GPU-specific requirements. Users are now not only able to compare costs across vendors, but also visualize configuration details such as the number of GPU s, GPU Memory and GPU Model (where provided by cloud service providers) helping them find the most cost-effective GPU resource for their workloads.

This enhances the data format supported for AWS Cost and Usage reporting with a couple of options now:

• AWS Legacy CUR
• AWS Standard Data export/ CUR 2.0

Before this release, Cloudability used to support only AWS CUR export which is now renamed as Legacy CUR export by AWS.

Existing customers on AWS legacy CUR can continue with the legacy CUR without any impact on the data ingestion or availability of data within Cloudability.

How to enable it

Customers would need to configure the CUR 2.0/ Standard Data export in the AWS Console.

Customer should configure the below in AWS Console:

• Standard Data export

• CUR 2.0

  • Include Resource ID s

  • Time Granularity as Hourly

  • Column selection - All (All columns will be selected by default)

  • Compression type and file format gzip - text/ csv

  • File Versioning as Overwrite existing data export file

Once the above settings are specified, follow the steps below in Cloudability

1. Navigate to Settings > Vendor Credentials > AWS .

2. Select and edit the Master Payer account.

3. Add the New S3 bucket name , Cost and Usage report prefix , Cost and Usage report name in Cloudability.

4. Save and download the CFT template.

5. Run the CFT template.

6. Verify Credentials.

The new UI is the default landing page for the Container Insights feature. However, you can easily toggle between two experiences by clicking the button referenced in the screenshots below.

Features Introduced

1. Customizable Dashboards

   We've added customizable dashboards, that will allow you to create visualizations, and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to you.

   Capabilities included:

   • Default Dashboard: Includes pre-configured widgets for quick insights into total cluster cost, idle cost, and other essential metrics. Each user has its own default dashboard.

   • Efficiency Score: A new metric to assess resource allocation efficiency.

   • Enhanced Visualization: Includes KPIs, trendlines, top X widgets, timeseries charts, and table widgets for a comprehensive view of your container footprint.

   • Customization Features:

     Cloud vendor filter support for dashboard-level filtering

     Multi-select functionality for cluster selection

   This release supports custom dashboard creation, along with various custom widgets types. You can also delete and add custom widgets in the default dashboard, and set them as your custom dashboards.
2. Treemap View

   The Treemap View provides a hierarchical visualization for clusters, enabling deeper analysis down to the container level:

   • Hierarchical Visualization: Allows drilling down from clusters to namespaces, workloads and containers.

   • Efficiency Score Visualization: Integrates efficiency scores within the Treemap view for quick assessments.

   Both Dashboards and the Treemap View support global filters for date, clusters, and cost basis.
   Widgets are organized with KPIs at the top and tables at the bottom for optimal visibility.

   Detailed Drill-Down Capability

   Our enhanced drill-down functionality allows seamless navigation:

   • From the dashboard, navigate to the table widget, and select a cluster to view its namespaces in the Treemap View.

   • Select a namespace in a Treemap to explore constituent workloads.

   • Clicking a workload reveals the containers within that workload.

     At each level of granularity, you can understand the different cost components, and efficiency score.

     Additional Information

     For in-depth container details within a workload:

     • Click a container to view the nodes it is operating on.

     • Updates to the details panel provide relevant information for each container grouping, ensuring you have access to the most logical details.

     New Cost Column: Miscellaneous Cost

     As part of this release, we are introducing a new column on the Container Insights page called the 'Miscellaneous Cost' column, available in the Table widget. This column will reflect cluster-specific costs, and will initially be null for all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). We will make this available for GCP first, with plans to expand support to other CSPs in the near future. These costs encompass additional expenses associated with containerized applications that extend beyond nodes, volumes, and data transfer. They include various services and resources necessary for cluster operations, providing a comprehensive view of all costs related to running containerized applications.

3. Cost Efficiency Score

   The Cost Efficiency Score is a KPI that measures the overall cost-effectiveness of resource allocation within a containerized environment. It compares the utilized cost against what is deemed the fair share or total cost. Understanding this score involves examining three main types of costs: fair share cost, utilization cost, and idle cost.

   Fair Share Cost / Total Cost

   Fair share cost represents the proportion of the total node cost attributed to a container based on its allocated percentage of each resource (CPU, Memory, GPU). This is calculated by multiplying the node cost for each resource by the fair share percentage of that resource allocated to the container. The total fair share cost for a container is the sum of these amounts for all resources.

   Utilization Cost

   Utilization cost reflects the actual cost of resources used by a container. It is calculated by multiplying the node cost of each resource by the utilization percentage of that resource on the node. Like fair share cost, the total utilization cost for a container is the aggregate of utilization costs for all resources.

   Idle Cost

   Idle cost is derived by subtracting the utilization cost from the fair share cost. It represents the cost of resources that are allocated but not utilized, indicating inefficiency.

   Cost Efficiency Score Calculation

   The Cost Efficiency Score is calculated by comparing utilized cost to fair share cost, encapsulating the efficiency of resource usage across all resources within a container, namespace, workload, or cluster. This score helps identify inefficiencies and potential areas for optimization, such as cluster or node rightsizing or improving workload pod affinity constraints.

   A lower Cost Efficiency Score indicates greater inefficiency, suggesting more significant opportunities for cost savings and optimization within the environment.

To learn more, visit Containers Insight 2.0: Dashboard and Widget Guide

What's new in this release

Earlier, Workload Planning was providing recommendations for Virtual Machines, without the option to select burstable instances, which was available in the OCI Cost Estimator. With this release, users can now choose a baseline CPU utilization of either 12.5% or 50% for burstable instances, representing a fraction of each CPU core. The baseline indicates the minimum CPUs that can be utilized continuously.

For each baseline, Workload Planning provides the associated cost estimate: opting for a baseline of 12.5% offers up to 87.5% in savings, while a baseline of 50% provides up to 50% in savings.

More information about this release

As such, we would also remove the existing privileged access to Resource Inventory through the Front Door permission called AWSResourceInventoryFullAccess and enable this feature for all users in the customer org because the admin user can now define data boundaries for resource inventory data via views.

Also, we have now removed the privileged permission in Front Door that is tied to Resource Inventory feature ( AWSResourceInventoryFullAccess ). This would make the feature available to all users within an org irrespective of any permission entitlement, similar to modules like Reports, True Cost Explorer etc.

What's new in this release

With this release, you can:

• Quickly identify the datasources available in Cloudability.

• Have a UI which is scalable, considering current integrations and future expansions.

• Have access to an Accessibility compliant A11y UI.

• Experience better performance on the Vendor Credentials UI loading times.

• Use new filtering and search capabilities on individual Vendor Credentials columns.

• Expand and collapse all accounts at a master payer/billing account level.

• Sort the details based on individual columns.

• Have better readability as we have improved the contrast ratios.

1. In Cloudability , navigate to Settings > Vendor Credentials .
2. To add a new data source, click Add Datasource . This will show all the data sources available to a customer.
3. Select a datasource you would like to credential.
4. Now, the Add account while credentialing overlay is displayed from the right-hand side.
5. Once credentialed, you will be able to view a Tab for the datasource.
   Note:

   The credentialing steps for each datasource remains the same.

6. Within the Tab, you will be able to Search and Filter on individual columns.
7. Click “…” to perform various actions as before. We have added text along with the icons:

   • View Details

   • Edit Account

   • Re-verify Account

   • Archive

   • Delete

8. The parent accounts (master payer and billing accounts among others) will collapse by default. Click individual accounts to view the next level of sub accounts (linked accounts and subscriptions or projects among others) or use the newly introduced Expand all/Collapse all icons.
9. The Vendor Credentials UI now supports lazy loading providing better performance on UI load times.

What's new in this release

Earlier, Workload Planning was only supporting predefined machine types for GCP, which have a preset number of vCPUs and amount of memory, and are charged at a set price. With this release, Workload Planning provides recommendations for standard and custom VMs, based on the vCPU and memory input. It allows you to choose the processing power and amount of memory without changing machine types. If a combination of vCPU and memory doesn’t exist, Workload Planning will prioritize the vCPU requirement, and look for the nearest memory amount.

What's new in this release

The three new permissions are:

What's new in this release

Before this release, Cloudability only provided class filtering for object storage rightsizing recommendations at the page level and only for the top recommendations given, with no way to filter globally or on an individual recommendation basis.

Starting today, you can quickly and easily start filtering rightsizing recommendations for object storage/S3 at a global level to hide recommendations for unwanted object storage classes.

To enable this feature, follow the steps below:

1. Starting from the Cloudability primary navigation menu, navigate to the Settings menu item, and select Rightsizing Preferences .
2. Select the Object storage Preferences tab on the page, and check “Exclude recommendations where the recommended storage class contains the following values”.
3. Under this option, there will be text boxes where you can enter additional values which will then exclude any object storage recommendations where the class contains these values.
   Note:

   Changes to these settings may take up to 24 hours to take effect.

This change will lead to a reduction in the amount of unmapped line items (mapped as 'Other'), address previously identified inaccuracies, and improve existing mappings. Additionally, more services across all CSPs are now mapped. Changes reflect for cost line items from May 1, 2024, and automatically for any reprocessed months.

Below are examples of what could change as a result:

• You might see Usage family API Request change to IO for some services such as AWS Sagemaker. The change mostly affects read/write operations.
• Specific to AWS, you might see changes from IO to Data Transfer. This is to align with the underlying units (BytesTransferred) for which you are charged.

What's new in this release

The toggle button between custom pricing and retail pricing is now available enabling easy switching between the two as and when needed.

Earlier, customers experienced inconsistencies where the same Azure regions had different names (For example, "EastUS" and "US East" for the same region). This release will resolve and prevent the need for additional mapping tables to be created on the customer’s end. This will normalize Azure region names that will provide customers with the required granularity for reporting.

For example: Following this change, instead of returning "Hong Kong" or "HongKong (East Asia)" as the region, the report would return EastAsia::Eastasia.

Prior to this release, you would rely on “item description” dimension to report on OCI instances. However, this approach posed challenges in generating reports seamlessly and identifying cost spikes easily. With this release, you can now leverage these 3 new dimensions to report on your OCI spend, as well as better understand and categorize compute instances.

How this feature can help you

With this GA release, Cloudability Admins gain enhanced control over Workload Planning’s recommendations through the introduction of new Workload Planning Preferences. Here, Admins can set default options for workload lease type (for example: On Demand, Spot), commitments, and input more discounts or uplifts. Additionally, Workload Planning permissions have been improved, enabling Cloudability Admins to oversee workloads created by users across their organization, promoting transparency and facilitating seamless information sharing among teams.

Cloudability Workload Planning represents an industry-first capability, which allows users to define cost-effective workloads with all necessary resources while considering deployment options across multiple cloud providers. This fosters greater efficiency and alignment between financial, and technical teams.

Workload Planning Preferences

These new controls introduced as a part of GA are accessible to Cloudability Admins by default. It empowers FinOps teams to centrally define, and restrict options for Workload Planning . Any of these settings are optional, and not required to use Workload Planning .

Before this release, rightsizing recommendations for AWS Lambda functions were not available in Cloudability. Providing these recommendations directly within Cloudability provides users with a more extensive, independent recommendation source to further optimize their AWS spends.

How to enable Rightsizing Recommendations for AWS Lambda

To enable this feature, follow the steps below:

1. Enable Lambda Insights enhanced monitoring to allow Cloudability to retrieve memory metrics for your lambda functions.
2. Create or download the updated AWS credential template in Cloudability and then upload the new credential template to the AWS Management Console.
3. From the Cloudability primary navigation menu, navigate to the Optimize menu item, and select Rightsizing .
4. Select the AWS tab on the Rightsizing page, and under the available AWS services select the Lambda tab. Any existing Lambda rightsizing recommendations will be displayed here.

How this feature can help you

This release addresses the unique needs of our APAC-based clients, ensuring their data remains within the APAC boundaries. By localizing our services, we aim to empower organizations to bolster their compliance efforts and align with the guidelines regarding cloud cost management data.

More information about the release

The launch of hosting Cloudability in the APAC region holds great significance for our customers operating within this region. It provides a reliable and compliant cloud cost management solution that prioritizes data residency, enhances data privacy, and aligns with data protection guidelines.

Starting today, users gain access to two new pages:

• From the Commitment Portfolio page, users can gain performance insights, set expiration alerts, and manage their portfolio of Flexible CUDs.

• From the Commitment Recommendations page, users can receive and adjust optimal recommendations to evaluate future commitment purchases.

How this feature can help you

With this release, we have reconfigured and introduced a new set of KPI’s and commitment meta data across the portfolio and recommendations pages. This information will help you better manage and understand the performance of your current commitments. For customers who are undercommented due to uncertainty in applying financial risk to commitment decisions, our enhancements to the Commitment Recommendations page will give you confidence to make more aggressive commitments to increase net savings.

More information about the release

Over the upcoming releases, we will continue to build out additional functionality to assist you in understanding the tradeoffs between different commitment terms, types, and strategies. We will reorganize the information architecture across the Commitment-based Discount functionality and we will look to support the majority of GCP spend-based commitment types.

How this feature can help you

Prior to this release, users who wished to model out workloads for OCI in Workload Planning could only leverage On-Demand or Spot (preemptible) pricing. With this update, you can now select 'Capacity Reservation' as a lease type option when adding a resource to your workload, similar to the option available in the OCI Cost Estimator . It's important to note that 'Capacity Reservation' is only supported for Virtual Machines and provides an additional 15% discount, which is forfeited upon utilization. For further details about OCI Capacity Reservation, please refer to the OCI Documentation .

As a reminder, any 'custom pricing' or 'custom discount' for OCI is by default factored in the resource price displayed in Workload Planning.

Capacity Reservation

You can now select 'Capacity Reservation' as a preferred lease type for OCI in the common information; the tool tip has been updated accordingly. When you choose this lease type, it will be the default selection for Virtual Machines recommendations.

You get visibility for Volume Performance Unit (into OCI Block storage VPU) amounts in the 'Attached Storage' recommendation screen. This information is not available for other cloud vendors.

How this feature can help you

Before this release, users faced the challenge of manually entering their requirements multiple times when evaluating different options for their cloud resources or comparing costs across various regions. Now, you can effortlessly clone your resources and adjust requirements. This will also allowing you to explore diverse configurations for your cloud resources with ease and precision.

How to enable resource duplication within a workload

1. Create a workload and add a resource.
2. Select the ‘Duplicate Resource’ icon to clone your resource.
3. Update the name for the resource duplicate and change the requirements.

   

   Note:

   You can now have resources in different regions within a given workload. You can update the resource region in “Search resource type (optional)” feature.

Use case example: Duplicating resources to compare AWS EC2 costs between two regions

1. Create a workload and add a resource. Use the “search resource type” option to get a cost estimate for t4g.2xlarge in us-west 1.
2. Duplicate the resource and rename it.
3. Update the region to us-west-2 for your duplicated resource.

   

How this feature can help you

Cloudability users have previously been able to leverage rightsizing recommendations to optimize Kubernetes at the workload level – tuning container request and limit settings. This launch adds a new set of recommendations, this time at the cluster level. The feature evaluates vendor-defined groups that back each cluster: ASG Node Groups for AWS, Node Pools for Azure, and GCP. The recommendations are built around understanding the historical resource usage of these groups, focusing on CPU and memory utilization. For each cluster, the tool then recommends the most cost-effective instance type and count that will meet the resource requirements for every hour across the reporting period.

For Cloudability , to generate these cluster-level recommendations we ingest your VM util data via the regular AWS, Azure and GCP credentials. In short, if you are already setup for VM rightsizing recommendations, then these cluster recommendations will already be available.

Support for AWS Detailed Billing Report (DBR)and Cost Allocation Report (CAR) is no longer available in Cloudability , however in the permissions view we were showing the permissions related to DBR and CAR until now with a red "x". With this release we have removed the DBR and CAR permissions display from the UI.

How this feature can help you

This ensures AWS customers get a cleaner view of relevant permissions related to the AWS Cost and usage reports.

How this feature can help you

Each module in Cloudability supports a specific set of cost metrics like such as Cost (Total), Cost (List), and Cost (Amortized) among others. Previously, Cost (Total) used to be the default cost metric displayed in these modules. Now, this features allows you to set your org's preferred cost metric as the default cost metric for each module. It will appear under Profile > Organization Settings in Cloudability for Cloudability Admin user roles only.

The cost metric set for each module will get applied as the default metric for all users across the entire Cloudability org.

How this feature can help you

The enhancement will help you improve the clarity of the cost metrics and simplify some of the reconciliation efforts.

More information about the release

Although, the Cost (Total) metric always aimed at delivering an unadulterated representation of the invoice cost – the “LineItem/UnblendedCost” column in the CUR file. However, there was one exception to this, implemented at the time to support a consistent transition between the DBR and CUR files. Logic was applied to these two item types:

• For usage covered by an RI – use “reservation/RecurringFeeForUsage”, instead of “LineItem/UnblendedCost”.
• For recurring RI line items – use “reservation/UnusedRecurringFee”, instead of “LineItem/UnblendedCost”.

This ensured that the usage line items had the consumed RI value assigned to them, instead of a zero value. It means, it moved cost from the monthly recurring lines to the usage lines. This helped in maintaining consistent behavior with the older, now deprecated, DBR file but had the downside of Cost (Total) not being a pure “pass through” cash metric. With Cloudability not supporting DBR anymore, these special rules for the Cost (Total) metric have been removed and the enhanced metric is reflected in the lineItem/UnblendedCost column .

If you have any questions or require further assistance or need historical data reprocessed under the new method, please reach out to your account team or support.

How this feature can help you

This provides the capability to apply the contractual discounts received from your GCP to GCP rightsizing recommendations. This also provides you with a more accurate representation of the cost savings achieved by optimizing your resources. This will improve the accuracy of the rightsizing recommendations by bringing attention to cost saving opportunities while identifying resources that can be resized to better match your underlying workloads.

More information about the release

You are required to provide Cloudability with access to your custom pricing data to enable this feature. Once this setup has been successfully completed, the new customer specific GCP pricing will be automatically applied to the GCP rightsizing recommendations and functionality. The primary GCP rightsizing functionality is located by navigating to Optimize > Rightsizing > GCP . GCP resource level costs will be available in Cloudability under Reports and Dashboards by selecting the resource id column.