Azure CSP & EA Cost Ingestion 

As reported in-application, Microsoft has intermittently and unexpectedly changed the format of its Tag data response such that the JSON cannot be parsed, inhibiting cost ingestion for many but not all Payers. 

While Microsoft works to address this issue, CloudCheckr has developed workaround code that will allow costs to be ingested, with the tag import skipped for any data rows impacted. 

This workaround code was deployed as part of Release 27.5 (July 15 in US Production), and only skips the tag if the JSON is in the improper format. Please note that all features related to tags may contain inaccurate data until this issue has been addressed by Microsoft. CloudCheckr is logging the “skipped row” event so that CloudCheckr Support can properly respond to any questions you may have. 

Azure Retail Calculation for Reserved Instance Purchases (CSP & EA)

Beginning with Release 27.1 on May 19, CloudCheckr is now calculating the retail rate for reservation purchases (both CSP and EA). This will automatically start applying for both the current, and all future months.

If you wish to update historic months, please contact CloudCheckr Technical Support or your Technical Account Manager (TAM) to get those months updated.

It is our expectation that the Retail and Standard costs portrayed in the platform will reflect the business arrangements that you and your customers may have with Microsoft. 

We have seen some scenarios under CSP where the retail cost for the reservation purchase matches the actual cost.  We have an open ticket with Microsoft to understand why this and if it is expected under certain conditions.

Note: While we collect the reservations during the month they are purchased, the purchase fees themselves will not appear until the invoice is made available by Microsoft.

API Deprecation and Replacement (Azure Only) 

CloudCheckr has deprecated the API call “get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_v2” on Azure only.

The same data is available via “get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_by_currency” to obtain the required data.

EC2 Reserved Instance Rebalancer Report Deprecation

The EC2 Reserved Instance Rebalancer Report has been removed from CloudCheckr with Release 27.3 on June 20. This feature was no longer in use and determined to be obsolete.

Best Practice Check Deprecation

CloudCheckr has deprecated four BPCs which relate to older scenarios no longer well-contemplated in code:    

• EC2 Reserved Instance Possible Mismatch
• RDS Reserved Instance Possible Mismatch
• ElastiCache Reserved Nodes Possible Mismatch
• Redshift Reserved Instance Possible Mismatch

These need to be considered at the Consolidated Family level and CloudCheckr has a number of reports at this level available in the Payer Account, such as the EC2 RI Purchase Recommendations report. These can be accessed via Cost > Reserved Usage > Recommendations:

Free Tier

AWS has always given away free tiers, and the CloudCheckr Tier Compression feature is designed to allow MSPs to give away the free tier to each customer who might otherwise choose to work with AWS directly to receive this benefit.

AWS released changes this year that increased the time-frame in which free tier was applicable (formerly it would only last the first 12 months). Additionally, their changes implemented new thresholds of Storage, Data-Transfer & CloudFront usage that would be covered by free tier. CloudCheckr has updated free-tier calculations to accommodate these changes.

One of the common implications of free tier is that MSPs must face the choice of giving away this larger amount free to each customer, or risk losing them to a direct AWS relationship. MSPs utilizing AWS’ model are subject to their consolidated billing structure. This means that these thresholds are seen across the whole bill and are not definable on a ‘per-customer’ basis. MSPs and customers utilizing CloudCheckr’s Account Family feature are able to further segregate groupings of accounts and treat them as their own bill. The free tier changes extend to the Account Family functionality as well. Each Account Family will be treated with the new thresholds as if it were its own bill, instead of looking at the totality of the consolidated bill’s spend.

SPP Credits 

AWS provides what are called Solution Provider Program discounts. These discounts come in the form of credits from AWS, based on the program agreement that you enter into with AWS. Although the SPP program discounts cover a large array of services, some services have new branches of offerings that are not a part of the SPP authorized services list.

CloudCheckr has updated several service categories, including DynamoDB accelerator (Amazon DAX), Workspaces Application Manager (WAM), Kinesis Data Analytics & Kinesis Data Firehose to better reflect their separation from their original umbrella services (DynamoDB, Workspaces & Kinesis respectively).

Include Credits in Custom Billing Charges

You can now choose to include Savings Plans Negation credits and/or All other credits when creating an “Add a percent discount or premium for all charges” and “Add a monthly percent charge or credit” Custom Charge. The default setting is to exclude both credits

Help Bot

You are now able to access CloudCheckr’s help resources straight from the app! The Help Bot, located on the Navigation pane, allows you to browse the CloudCheckr Success Center without leaving CloudCheckr CMx, it also holds links to other resources including our Online Learning Portal and the Product Announcements and Release Notes page. In addition to those resources, there is a tab within the bot to provide feedback on your experience with CloudCheckr. 

Bug Fixes and Improvements

27.0

• Added reporting for new RDS instance types
• Resolved an issue where some Azure Reserved Instances were not reporting costs during some months
• Resolved an issue where a Best Practice check for S3 Buckets Not Enforcing Server-Side Encryption with a Bucket Policy was incorrectly reporting results
• Resolved an issue where some Saved Filters were not being updated correctly

27.1

• Resolved an issue where Cost Alerts were using the Advanced Filtering report instead of Advanced Grouping
• Resolved an issue where Azure Enterprise Agreements were incorrectly reporting the Zone rather than Region
• Resolved an issue where CMx Dashboards were unable to update when a payee changed payers within the same month
• Resolved an issue where Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (AmazonDAX) services were not presenting costs
• Resolved an issue where Bastion and Bandwidth Meter Categories were incorrectly displaying Retail cost in Azure Enterprise Agreements
• Resolved an issue where the Forecast was not including Custom Cost Configurations
• Resolved an incorrect reporting in the “Buckets Allowing Access via HTTP” BPC

27.2

• Resolved an issue where the export for Change Monitoring contained no data
• Resolved an issue with Azure EA where Marketplace Costs were categorized incorrectly
• Resolved an issue where the Saved Filter email data does not match the data in the UI
• Resolved an issue where the chart returned in Advanced Grouping was showing incorrect max and min values when grouped hourly
• Resolved an issue with missing Dynamo DB Summary SnapBacks
• 
  

27.3

• Resolved an issue where some Azure EAs were not ingesting data
• Resolved an issue where Azure Memory Metrics were not showing in the Right Sizing Report
• Resolved an issue with the Azure Right Sizing report not displaying the current cost for a VM correctly
• Resolved an issue where the Forecast was displaying incorrect amounts
• Added support for Datadog EU region
• Resolved an issue with the grant_user api call returning an error
• Resolved an error in the Daily Advanced Grouping Saved Filter email when comparing MTD costs
• Resolved an issue that did not allow ‘ignore’ comments to be entered into Best Practice Checks
• Redirected the “Reserved EC2 Instance Not Fully Utilized” BPC to the correct reports
• Resolved an issue where remediation comments were not saving in the CIS Benchmark

27.4

• Added support for some additional one time charges for Azure CSPs, including “SendGrid” charges
• Resolved an issue with Azure Advanced Grouping where the tags were not loading in the drop down for filtering by tags
• Resolved an issue where the Azure Reservation Billing Configuration page was not saving changes
• Resolved an issue where accounts with no credentials and no billing data were sending emails
• Updated the “Idle SQL Database Instances” predicted cost to take be more accurate
• Updated the export from the Well Architected Readiness Advisor report to include the associated Best Practice Check
• Resolved an issue where some projects were not displaying the Total Compliance Report
• Resolved an issue where a payee account was not created automatically and not able to be added manually to CloudCheckr

Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) can offer discounts, depending on their commitment plan, yet many businesses forgo the benefit and lose out on their potential savings rates. On top of that, managing the on-going changes and predicting long-term use is challenging and time consuming for most organizations. The solution? 

CloudCheckr's new Eco Optimization integration for Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners.

Using deep analytics, forecasting models, and the Reserved Instance Marketplace, Eco automatically purchases the optimal portfolio of commitments for you. Eco uses real-time tracking of RI and savings plan utilization to identify any decrease in usage so that instances can be sold back to the AWS Marketplace, if needed.

Eco enables you to get the most out of cloud commitment purchases, including:

• Fully utilizing commitments: Ensure maximum ROI on cloud commitment purchases with analysis, modification, and mapping of unused reserved instances and savings plans to resource demands.
• Managing commitment lifecycles: Ensure workloads are always running at optimal pricing by automating purchasing strategies for reserved instances in the AWS Marketplace throughout their lifecycle.
• Aligning finance & DevOps: Collaborate more effectively between Finance and DevOps teams by providing full visibility into compute consumption and automation of optimal reserved instances and savings plans strategies.

For more information on how MSPs can take advantage of the Eco Optimization integration within CloudCheckr CMx, please contact your Technical Account Manager.

Check out the docs

New Archive of Customer Success Webinars

Did you miss one of our webinars detailing new features and updates for CMx? Our archive of past Customer Success webinars can now be found in the Training / Education section of the Success Center.

Check out the archive

New Personal Dashboards

Have you ever wanted to create a dashboard of cost consumption and spend for a very specific workload that only you want more information about? Or create dashboards without interrupting shared content across teams or partners? Personal dashboards are here! 

With these dashboards, any user with access to cost data and reports can create their own dashboards as a one-stop shop for the data most relevant to them.

Your new personal dashboard is specific to you; unlike global dashboards, personal dashboards are currently only associated with the user who creates them. You can even create different personal dashboards for different types of data.

You can then select your dashboard the new Personal category using the Dashboard drop-down menu.

Check out the docs

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Improved loading times on the AWS CloudTrail Events report. improvement 
• Improved the way taxes are processed for Azure CSP reservation purchases. improvement 
• Updated the AWS Business Support calculation to better handle discounts earned from Savings Plans. improvement 
• Resolved an issue where some in-app notifications had dead links that would send users to non-existing pages. fix 
• Resolved an issue where the List of Accounts page was displaying some uncredentialed accounts as having valid credentials. fix 
• Resolved an issue where the invoice generator was not displaying custom charge descriptions in certain scenarios. fix 

New Azure Reservation Billing Configuration Report

CloudCheckr’s new Azure Reservation Billing Configuration report allows CSPs to choose how Azure reservation fees are applied across their customers and subscriptions. You can set default fee assignment behavior and control fee assignment on a per-reservation basis, ensuring your chargebacks and invoices reflect the fees exactly how you need them.

The report shows all of the reservations owned within your CSP. You can use the controls on the page to filter the list by searching for specific Reservation IDs, Reservation Order IDs, or by Customer.

To access this feature, go to Billing > Configure > Azure Reservation Billing Configuration.

Check out the docs

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Added support for Asia Pacific (Jakarta) AWS Region. announcement 
• Added the ability to export selected columns to the List of RDS DB Instances report. improvement 
• Resolved an issue where the BPC large export was not always generating for some Azure MAVs. fix 

Success Center Reorganization

The CloudCheckr Success Center has been reorganized to help you find the information you need more quickly and easily. Previously, finding a specific topic could be difficult, as it could have been living under buried headings. Now, for example, if you're looking for a topic related to Cost, you'll find it under the Cost heading. 

It's important to note that nothing has been deleted, and all custom URLs still work.  With this update our topics just now live in more straightforward categories.

Note: On the Home page, the drop-down box for each category currently opens at the bottom of the page. This will be fixed in an upcoming release.

Improvements to Azure Retail non-USD Costs

We have improved the way we calculate non-USD Azure retail costs.  Previously we were leveraging the Azure Retail APIs directly for non-USD cost, which sometimes resulted in costs that didn’t match the same rates published to the customer reconciliation file.  Working with Microsoft support we determined that the exchange rates for the Retail API and reconciliation files were not updated at the same frequency.  With this update we now leverage the same data from the reconciliation file, ensuring that the costs we display in our app will match the data on the customer side.

Please note that a reload is required to have these changes applied against any historic months.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Updated Azure EA & MCA edit credential workflow improvement 
• Added support for the AWS EC2 instance family: eg1 improvement 
• Addressed an issue preventing some Azure VM Right-Sizing and Inventory Reports from populating fix 
• Addressed an issue preventing some AWS MAVs from showing complete EC2 trend data fix

Updated AWS CIS Benchmark report to v1.4

We have updated our CIS Benchmark report to version 1.4.  This update required several changes to our existing report, including re-ordering and re-numbering most of the controls. Additionally, we've changed the Scored/Not Scored column to Manual/Automated.

Check out the docs

Updated Best Practice Checks

We have updated the Stale IAM Users best practice check to identify any IAM user who has not signed in within the last 45 days. Previously, this check identified users who had not signed in within 90 days.

We have also added the following best practice checks:

• Regions Not Enforcing EBS Volumes Encryption Upon Creation
• S3 Buckets Not Configured to Block Public Access
• RDS Instances Without Encryption Enabled
• IAM Users With Multiple Access Keys
• Expired SSL/TLS Certificates Stored in IAM
• Regions Without IAM Access Analyzer Enabled
• IAM Users in Multi-Account Environments Not Being Managed via Identify Federation or AWS Organizations
• S3 Buckets Without MFA Delete Enabled
• S3 Buckets Not Logging Object-Level Write Events
• S3 Buckets Not Logging Object-Level Read Events
• S3 Buckets with data not Discovered, Classified, and Secured
• Log Metric Filter and Alarm Do Not Exist for Changes to AWS Organizations
• Network ACLs Allowing Ingress from 0.0.0.0/0 to Administration Ports

Note: The IAM policy associated with your AWS account will need the following new permissions to fully support these updates:
     "s3:GetBucketPublicAccessBlock"
     "s3:GetBucketVersioning"
     "ec2:GetEbsEncryptionByDefault"

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Improved the CloudTrail Aggregate S3 Bucket Credential process to require S3 bucket region. improvement 
• Improved the load times for the AWS RI Amortization report in Multi-Account Views. improvement 
• Fixed an issue that prevented some custom inventory emails from sending. fix 
• Fixed an issue that prevented the get_resources_ec2_details_V4 API call from returning data. fix 
• Fixed an issue that prevented the Best Practice Email from sending when AWS Trusted Advisor checks were not available. fix 
• Removed the EC2 Security Group Connections and VPC Flow Log Connections reports due to reduced customer interest and to streamline our navigation and interface. Additionally, we have deprecated the Legacy Azure RI Configuration page in preparation for our new Azure RI Configuration setup solution, which will be released in the coming weeks.  improvement

CloudCheckr’s new Well-Architected Readiness Advisor report helps MSPs streamline the process of delivering AWS Well-Architected Reviews, while ensuring that your customers’ AWS environments are continuously in compliance with the Well-Architected Framework.

This new report, which can be found under the Total Compliance menu of the report navigation, automatically centralizes CloudCheckr's Best Practice Checks and aligns them with their respective Well-Architected Review questions.  

The report also allows you to view, add, and edit notes for each question. Notes added to the Readiness Advisor report are synchronized between the AWS Well-Architected Tool and CloudCheckr, so that any updates made within the Readiness Advisor report will be synced back to the AWS Console upon save. 

Check out the docs

Track Savings Plan commitments with the Savings Plan Runway Chart

If you want to maintain a healthy discount coverage using Savings Plans, then you need better visibility into Savings Plan expiration times and consumption in order to plan out your future coverage. 

You can now track your Savings Plan commitments using the new Runway chart on the Savings Plan Analytics report. This chart shows you the total commitment of your Savings Plans within the next 3, 6, or 12 months. This data can also be compared with the last 3 or 6 months, giving you a more informed idea of your past, present, and future Savings Plan commitments. 

By looking at the total commitments of all your Savings Plans on the Runway chart, you can more easily decide if you need to purchase additional Savings Plans to cover periods of peak consumption or for months when your current Savings Plans are set to expire.

View Savings Plan details using the Inventory table

For in-depth details of your Savings Plans, you can now use the Inventory table on the Savings Plan Analytics report. This table shows the Type, Status, Commitment types, Fees, and more related to each of your Savings Plans. By filtering and searching the table, you can find the data you need for specific Savings Plans more quickly and easily. You can also export this data to a CSV file for further analysis.

Check out the docs

Create custom cost dashboards using Tag Key-Value pair

CMx Dashboards now include the ability to group by or filter to one or many Tag Key-Value pairs. This allows you to generate unique cost-over-time reports by business unit, environment, project, and more using Tag Key combinations.

Grouping by a Tag Key generates a comparison of all associated values. From here, you can further refine the results by filtering down to particular Tag Key-Value pairs.

Check out the docs

See your AWS Account Friendly Names in your Dashboards

Using our Tag Mapping feature, you can direct the costs from specific tags or properties to a custom tagging structure, allowing you to more efficiently organize your costs, whether you have five for 5,000 tags in your cloud account. With this update, we've improved that bulk creation process, giving you the ability to pair tag conditions with property conditions using the CSV file upload. 

Example upload:

We have also made improvements to errors when processing the CSV files. The row number and reason for any failures will be displayed at the end of the upload process, allowing you to identify what failed and why.

Check out the docs

Updates to Advanced Grouping Monthly & Weekly Emails

We have improved the user experience when configuring emails within the Advanced Grouping report to ensure the proper settings are chosen. When aggregating your saved filter by week or month, you will no longer be able to save an incompatible daily email. If you do need a daily email, be sure to update your save filter to aggregate the data daily.

Please note that if you load an existing saved filter that has an incompatible email/aggregate filter, you will see a message to update and re-save your email settings.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• AWS Account Friendly Names were not showing in some reports. fix 
• Some payers were inadvertently classified as a payee. fix 
• Some consolidated billing emails from MAVs were not being sent fix 
• Improved resource inventory collection for the AWS China Region. improvement 

Use CloudCheckr CMx to manage your Azure MCA accounts

You can now view and manage the costs associated with your Azure MCA account in CloudCheckr CMx. To add your MCA account(s), select the MCA or Enterprise Agreement Account option when credentialing a new account.  

You will need an Azure Portal user with access to the desired MCA account, with Billing Admin (or higher) permissions, to complete configuration.

Note: You can use this new credentialing process to add your Enterprise Agreement accounts. The previous Enterprise Agreement credentialing method, which required API keys, can still be accessed by selecting the Enterprise Agreement Legacy Account option.

Check out the docs

Streamlined the function to add new CMx Dashboard panes and pages

We’ve made it easier for Admin users to add a new pane or entire page when managing their Dashboards.   

Within the Dashboard page, clicking the +NEW button gives you the option to either:

• Create a New Pane within the current Dashboard; or
• Create a New Dashboard Page to edit as desired.

Check out the docs

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Some uncredentialed accounts were showing a valid credential flag. fix 
• Improved Dashboard loading times. improvement 
• AWS Account Friendly Names were not showing in some reports. fix