Azure Resource Inventory

Key Use Cases for Resource Inventory

1. Cost to Utilization Data Mapping

   Solution: By combining the Resource Inventory with Cloudability's synthetic tags (tag dimensions, account groups and business mappings), you can accurately map resource costs. For example, you can see the exact CPU and Memory utilization of a specific Compute Engine instance belonging to "Team Alpha" and allocate its cost accordingly. This enables robust showback reports for teams to understand their consumption and informed chargeback models for internal billing.

2. Waste Reduction

   Challenge: Over-provisioned resources lead to unnecessary cloud spend. Identifying underutilized Compute Engine instances or Managed Disks manually is time-consuming and prone to error.

   Solution: Leverage the CPU Utilization (Avg), Memory Utilization (Avg), and Memory Used metrics from the inventory. Identify instances with consistently low average CPU or memory usage. For Managed Disks, monitor their size relative to actual data stored to identify opportunities for downsizing.

3. Performance Optimization and Bottleneck Identification

   Challenge: Under-provisioned resources can lead to performance bottlenecks, impacting application responsiveness and user experience. Identifying the root cause requires detailed utilization data.

   Solution: Analyze CPU Utilization (Max), Memory Utilization (Max), and Network Utilization (Max). Spikes in these metrics could indicate a need to scale up resources. This data helps you proactively optimize resource allocation to ensure optimal application performance.

4. Proactive Issue Resolution

   Challenge: Unexpected cost spikes or performance degradation can be difficult to pinpoint without granular resource-level data.

   Solution: Regularly monitor the utilization metrics provided by the Resource Inventory. Sudden, unexplained increases in CPU Utilization (Min) or Memory Used on an otherwise stable instance could indicate a runaway process, misconfiguration, or even a security incident. By setting up alerts based on these metrics, you can detect anomalies early and take corrective action before they significantly impact costs or operations.

5. Lifecycle Management and Resource Governance

   Challenge: Tracking the lifecycle of cloud resources, from launch to de-provisioning, can be complex, leading to "zombie" resources that incur costs without providing value.

   Solution: The "launch date of resources" combined with utilization metrics, are invaluable. Identify resources that have been running for an extended period with persistently low utilization. For instance, a Compute Engine instance with a very old launch date and consistently low CPU Utilization (Avg) and Memory Utilization (Avg) might be a forgotten resource that can be safely terminated. This proactive approach ensures better resource governance and prevents unnecessary spending.

By providing a unified view of your inventory, complete with detailed utilization metrics and critical metadata, Cloudability empowers you to make data-driven decisions, optimize your cloud spend, and enhance the efficiency of your cloud operations.

Getting started

Azure Resource Inventory reporting feature must be enabled for your Cloudability Org. You must reach out to your TAM/CSM/account point of contact from Apptio to get this done. Once enabled, allow 2-3 business days for the data to start appearing in your inventory reports.

Inventory Reporting Measures

• Measures are categorized as either general columns or tag columns. You can include up to 20 columns to an individual report.
• For each Azure service, a specific set of measures are supported.
• You can filter your respective inventory reports using any of the measures available within this feature.

Clickable KPIs for Quick Filtering

For every service (For example: Compute or Managed Disks), KPIs will be displayed at the top of the report to provide you with key summary information such as Inactive Compute Instances and Untagged Compute Instances . You can click and filter the Inventory report based on these KPIs to drill down to the specific report data you are looking for.

Inventory Reporting Date Windows

You can choose the period in the date picker for which you want to view the inventory data for each service. Maximum allowed range for selection is 31 days. Upon enabling this feature, resource inventory data will be back filled to the beginning of the current month. Over time, inventory data will be available on a three-month rolling window. At any point in time, you will be able to access resource inventory data for the current month along with the previous two months.

Statistical Filtering using the Display Filter

From the inventory data generated for a specific service and time period, you can now choose to display a subset of that data, whether it is the top x number or the x percentage of resources based on your preferred cost or utilization metric.

For example: Resource Inventory displays 1000 records for Compute service for a period of seven days. You can further filter this display by choosing to view only top 25% of these resources, based on Cost (Total). Applying this filter would then return the top 250 resources based on Cost (Total) sorted from highest to the lowest.

Exporting Reports

Clicking  Export  on top right of the report table will export all selected inventory columns with any filter(s) applied. However, to export the full inventory data for the selected month and service with all supported columns, click the Export  button on the top right of the filters drop down in the toolbar of the tab.

Saving Resource Inventory Reports

You can save a report with its date, service and filter selections and share this report with other users in the org by granting them “View Only” or “Edit” permissions. On the top right of the toolbar in Resource Inventory UI, you can see an ellipse with three dots icon clicking on which would open the Report Actions menu with these options.

Using Resource Inventory

1. To access Azure Resource Inventory, navigate to Insights> Resource Inventory and click the Azure tab.

1. Select the service from Services dropdown for which you want to view your resource inventory.

2. Select the date range for which you want to view resource inventory data. You can choose to view up to 31 days of data at the maximum. The data displayed will be sorted by Cost (Total) in descending order by default.

3. Click on any of the KPIs with the blue bar on the left to filter your reports based on that specific KPI.

4. Click the table settings button at the top right of resource inventory table to configure the measures and tags that you want displayed as columns in the table.

The selected measures and tags are displayed as columns in the table.

1. Click Filters to apply any filters to your inventory report.

2. Use the Display drop down above the Resource Inventory Details table to specify the top or bottom percentage of rows to display in the table and to sort the table descending by the preferred cost or utilization metric.

3. Click the Export button at the top right of the Resource Inventory Details table to export all the columns showing in the table filtered by your filter settings. To export all the inventory data for the selected month and service with all the supported columns, click Export button, at the right of the Filters drop down in the toolbar of the tab.

Resource Measures showing 'Not Available'

For some resources, you may find that some measures, such as Launch Date , State, and Size among others, show as Not Available in the Resource Inventory report. This means that Cloudability was not able to fetch data for those specific measures due to one of the following reasons:

- You may not have done advanced credentialing for the account to which the particular resource(s) belong.

- The lifespan of the resource(s) may have been too short to capture the data for those measures.

KPI Definitions