Use CloudCheckr CMx to get AWS Savings Plans purchase recommendations!

Our new AWS Savings Plans Recommendations report gives you the ability to create a detailed, customized list of purchasing recommendations, showing your potential savings over on-demand pricing.

The report consists of two key features:

• Dashboard-style panes where you can visualize your covered and uncovered spend.
• A recommendation builder where you can create customized recommendations based on user-defined filter criteria.  You can use this builder to compare similar recommendations side-by-side or create a menu of multiple options for review.

To access the report, navigate to Home > Cost Savings > SP Recommendations. You can also search for SP Recommendations in the report search bar at the top of the application.

Please note that the IAM Policy configured for your account must have ce:GetSavingsPlansPurchaseRecommendation permissions.

Check out the docs

Access our updated release notes experience directly in CMx

You can now access our updated release notes experience directly from the CMx application by clicking the Settings icon in the top-right of the app and selecting What's New?

That will present you with a pop-up containing our full, recent release notes.  From this pop-up, you can search for updates, link out to https://releasenotes.cloudcheckr.com/, or subscribe to future updates.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Updated the image that displays while a dashboard pane is being generated. improvement 
• Improved messaging when no data is returned in the Advanced Grouping report. improvement 
• Added support for Puerto Rico within Azure Retail Costs. improvement 
• In some scenarios, the Elastic MapReduce Inventory report would error when loading additional pages. fix 
• Fixed a unique scenario where an Azure Subscription could lose its EA billing status. fix

Amazon Connect Split Into Three Services announcement 

We have created two additional services to provide better visibility and control over costs associated with the Amazon Connect service.  In addition to seeing Amazon Connect within your Service filters, you will now also see Amazon Contact Lens and Amazon Contact Center Telecommunications.  

This update allows for greater granularity when reviewing usage and costs from Amazon Connect.  And for those of you applying custom charges or discounts to these costs, you now have greater control over how those updates are applied. 

Please note that if you did already have a custom charge applied to the Amazon Connect service, that same charge will automatically be applied to both Amazon Contact Lens and Amazon Contact Center Telecommunications costs.  This will ensure no impact to your costs.  You can de-select these new services from your custom charges if you so wish.  However, we do advise that you review any Tag Mappings based on that service to ensure your tags are being mapped appropriately.

Bug Fix

• Addressed an issue where the Alert Results page was displaying tags in the incorrect fields. fix 

RELEASE NOTES 

Create unique Dashboards for yourself, your team, or customers!

CMx Admin users now have the ability to create Custom Dashboards. 

These Dashboards can be personalized with visualizations and data tailored to the needs of specific customers or business units. 

• Create and manage metrics across your entire business with a consistent dashboard solution for each department or team.
• Build unique dashboards for each of your customers to elevate the services you are providing to them.

Custom Dashboards can be made visible to all accounts or restricted to a subset of accounts/account groups as desired.

Please note that Non-Admin users can view Custom Dashboards made available to them by CMx Admins, but cannot edit the data or visualizations shown.

Check out the docs

Bug Fixes and Improvements FIX 

• Improved load times on the AWS Historic Monthly Billing Summary report IMPROVEMENT
• Improved messaging when required data is not available to build Savings Plans Analytics report charts IMPROVEMENT 
• Under certain circumstances, the AWS Security Permissions page would fail to load FIX 
• Some Tag Mapping CSV uploads were failing to save FIX

RELEASE NOTES 

Savings Plans Analytics and Trends announcement 

Better understand your Savings Plans consumption and utilization by quickly identifying your coverage, savings, utilization, and waste. See your savings and waste trends over customizable timeframes and identify your overall Savings Plans efficiency.

CMx Dashboards improvement 

If you wished you could see a full-page report from your CMx Dashboard, you now can! Every CMx Dashboard pane has a new “Expand” feature which will create a full-page report of your underlying dashboard pane. Expand allows you to see additional details about your data and provides better context for your analysis.

Additionally, we've added more data points to the X and Y selection options for each dashboard pane, giving more options to how you can visualize data.

API UPDATES improvement 

CMx Dashboard APIs - If you wish to retrieve CMx Dashboard data, you can now use the CMx Dashboard API to collect multi-cloud cost data.

Bug Fixes

• Legacy Dashboards viewed in CMx can sometimes have panes cut off or hidden fix 
• Reseller configuration page could sometimes render portions of the screen and not the whole page. fix 
• Custom login pages could sometimes not display a custom image. fix 
• In-app notifications could sometimes have dead links and would send users to non-existing pages. fix 
• Improved Advanced Grouping query times by reducing the number of network requests required to return the requested dataset. improvement  
• Some Azure billing-only subscriptions were not able to be updated with credentials. fix 
• Resolved edge cases preventing some inventory data from being collected. fix 
• Under unique circumstances, Azure Advisor tab was missing from the Best Practice report. fix 
• Under unique circumstances, AWS Trusted Advisor tab was missing from the Best Practice report. fix 
• Under unique circumstances, the AWS Historical Summary report would sometimes fail to load. fix

AZURE UPDATES improvement

Added ability to populate historic reservation purchases under CSP.

However, when querying Azure CSP reservations, we are limited to 3 months of historical data. With this update, we’ve implemented a method that allows us to work with customers to backfill the data we’re unable to obtain programmatically.  Please reach out to Support if you have any reservations that are not showing up in your cost reports.

AZURE UPDATES

Improvements to Billing Update Cadance for L2 Child Accounts

NOTE: This only impacts customers using the L1/L2 configuration.

When a billing update completes at the L1 parent level, it will now force an update to start at the L2 account. This will help ensure data freshness within the child L2 account.

API UPDATES

New AWS API call: billing/delete_tag_mapping

This new API call deletes existing tag mappings.

CMx UPDATES

Added Pie charts to Custom dashboards

You can now select Pie charts as your format when you build a custom dashboard.

AZURE UPDATES

Reservation Purchase Support for Indirect EA Accounts

We have augmented our product support for Indirect Enterprise Agreement (EA) accounts. Now, when you purchase a reservation within any Indirect EAs account, we will collect those costs and show them in the appropriate Cost report.

CMx UPDATES

Manage existing API access keys with CloudCheckr CMx technology

You can now use CloudCheckr CMx access tokens when running API calls in our legacy product. You can still use your existing API access keys in the legacy product, but access tokens will provide better security, more consistent authorization management, and the ability to access multiple projects and accounts.

Set Azure currency in a Cost dashboard

If you have an Azure account that uses a currency other than the default option of US dollars (USD), you can now select from a list of available currencies on the Home page of your Azure account.

Updated the Account Export function

We made the following changes to our export function:

• Added a Credential Status column
• Increased the API page size to 100
• Changed the Provider Id column label to Provider ID

Access legacy and CloudCheckr CMx dashboards through the Overview list

When you open the Overview drop-down list on the Home page, you can now choose from dashboards created in our legacy product in addition to the new dashboards you create in CloudCheckr CMx.

Added two new panes to Custom dashboards

You can now choose from two additional pane options when building a dashboard:

• Table: allows you to view your data in a spreadsheet-style format
• 100% Stacked Bar: converts your values from absolute to a percentage of the total

Added a new column to the Users page

Added the User Level Access? column to the Users page under Settings > Access Management. This column will display Yes or No to indicate if a user has direct access to CloudCheckr CMx regardless if you have assigned a role to the user.

AWS UPDATES

Updated the Historical Billing Summary report to display 18 months of data

Changed the Historical Billing Summary report to show 18 months' worth of data by default rather than 36 months of historic costs.

Updated the EC2 List of Reserved Instances report for CUR payers

We have updated the EC2 List of Reserved Instances report for Payer accounts based on the AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR)—allowing our software to populate data directly from the CUR instead of applying our analysis to fields such as Instances Using Reserved Instances and Percent Consumed.

CMx UPDATES

Custom cost dashboards are now available

We now support and allow you to create custom Cost dashboards on the Home page—enabling you to highlight trends in cost data by creating new charts, drill in on spend within selected service categories, and more.

Set a custom landing page for all users

On the Customization page, admins can now define what page or report users will see when they first log in to the application.

API UPDATES

New AWS and Azure API call: billing/add_tag_mapping

Created this new API call, so that you can add custom tag mappings to your cost reporting.

New Azure API call: inventory/get_resources_azure_load_balancer_details

Created this new API call to enable customers to retrieve results from the Azure List of Load Balancers report.

New Azure API call: billing/get_cost_saving_azure

Created this new API call to enable customers to retrieve results from the Azure Cost Savings report.

AWS UPDATES

Improved CloudTrail alert ignore workflow

We have made several usability improvements to the ignoring results from the AWS CloudTrail security alerts. Our Help text now includes an explanation on how to ignore multiple users, leverage wildcards, and add alerts that use the Contain element versus All. You can also add multiple ignore rows for both request parameters and response elements. These improvements should make it easier for you to ensure that you’re the only one getting alerts on the events which are more important to you.

AZURE UPDATES

Added support for new region

We now support Azure deployments in the Brazil Southeast region.

VM Right-Sizing Added to MAVs

You can now view the Right-Sizing recommendations for your Azure virtual machines (VMs) in the Azure Multi-Account Views (MAVs) account types. You can find this report in the Utilization module of any selected Azure MAV.

Subscription-Level Historic and Current Costs for Azure Plan Transitions

When a subscription account transitions to Azure Plan within a cloud solution provider (CSP), you can now view its historic and current costs. Previously, you needed to add the subscription account twice. This change also ensures that you have consistent costs throughout the lifetime of the subscription.

GENERAL UPDATES

Improved messaging for large Advanced Grouping exports

We have improved the text that displays after you execute an export in the Advanced Grouping report to better clarify why we must deliver your data via export.

AWS UPDATES

Updates to AWS GovCloud Account Configuration

We have made the following changes to the configuration process for AWS GovCloud accounts so that you can more easily onboard and manage these accounts:

• You no longer need to add a commercial paying account ID to create a GovCloud account. However, without the paying commercial account, the software won’t display any cost data.
• You can change the linked commercial paying account after you create the account. This update allows you to correct mistakes during onboarding without having to delete and recreate the account.
• The software can now validate that you are not assigning the same commercial account to multiple GovCloud accounts.

Update to VPC Security Group IP Range Collection

We updated the way we collect IP ranges from VPC security groups, which corrected an issue where—under certain conditions—our software displayed None instead of 0.0.0.0 on inbound or outbound rules. As a result, these rule changes may impact the Security Group Rules Added and/or Deleted rows in the Change Monitoring report for the data collected on February 2, 2021. While this change is expected for that date, it should not impact any other dates. If you have any questions, please contact our Support team.

AZURE UPDATES

Added Cost Savings report to Multi-Account Views

We have added the Cost Savings report to the Azure Multi-Account Views (MAVs).

Better multi-currency support for invoicing

If you are an Azure customer who use multiple currencies in your Payer account, you can now convert each currency separately during invoicing. Under the Advanced Options in the Invoice Generator, we will show a row for each currency we detected in the cost data that you can convert.

Added support for Gateway Load Balancers

We updated the EC2 Load Balancer Inventory reports and Best Practice Checks to support Gateway Load Balancers.

AWS UPDATES

Added support for more projects within the Jira integration

We have updated our Jira integration to support all the available projects within a Jira account. Previously, this list was limited to 50 projects. You can manage your Jira integration by navigating to Account Settings > Integrations > Configurations.

New AWS Well-Architected Tool Inventory report

To support AWS’s Well-Architected Tool, we have launched the AWS List of Well-Architected Workloads report, which can help you gain visibility and track your workloads and milestones from the Well-Architected Tool over time. This report provides a summary of your workloads—showing accounts, owners, risks, and more—as well as a detailed breakdown of each milestone set against your workload. The report breaks down each milestone by lenses and pillars, allowing you to see how your workloads have evolved over time.

To access this report, navigate to Inventory (or Resources) > Well-Architected. By default, this report is disabled; to enable it, click the link within the report. Once enabled, the software will begin to retrieve data from the Well-Architected Tool and build the report.

Please note that new IAM permissions are required for us to report on this data: "wellarchitected:List*" and "wellarchitected:Get*".

AZURE UPDATES

Government Subscription VM Memory Metrics Improvements

We’ve made updates to the ways we can get VM memory metrics for Azure Government subscriptions. Those metrics are visible within our reporting and are leveraged for recommendations such as Right-Sizing.