New Month-end Finalization Capabilities for AWS

• Added ability to delay billing period locking to a specified date for AWS Payer Accounts to allow customers to automatically include out-of-cycle billing charges before a month is finalized in CloudCheckr.  

The day the report is finalized - the default option

Day _ of every month - Will wait for that day to complete before locking the previous month. For example, if you choose the 10th day of every month February will lock on the 10th of March.

The last day of each month - For example, February will not lock and finalize until the last day of March. 

Use Case:

The change to the locking date will help with the case of AWS bills becoming finalized but Credits or Support Charges have not yet been applied to the account.  Usually, AWS will apply for Credits after the bill has been finalized (i.e. Invoice Number written to the CUR) which would previously require a reload on a payer account for it to be reflected correctly in CloudCheckr.  By changing when you want your lock to be performed you can ensure you are selecting a date after you normally see credits applied to your account, avoiding the need to manually reload payer accounts. 

Improvements

• Added ability to email a notification that a month's billing data has been finalized (AWS and Azure)

• Paying Account ID is visible and usable as a grouping option in Advanced Grouping so that customers can tie back the presented spend to the original owner of the overall bill with which it is associated

  • AWS Provider ID and friendly name for the payer account associated with the linked account

  • Azure, we present the ID of the CSP, EA, or MCA associated with the subscription

    • MCA or EA: the enrollment/agreement ID
    • CSPs: the GUID displayed as the provider ID for the CSPs on the list of accounts
• Inclusion of resource tag data for the Elasticsearch AWS service

Fixes

• Admin page “Manage Emails” does not save % cost alert configurations

  • Setting now saves as expected

• Improperly Tagged Resources report showing terminated instances

  • These instances which have been terminated are now removed from the Improperly Tagged Resources report

• CIS Benchmarks toggles added:

  • 4.6, 4.9, 4.12, 4.13

30.0

Improvements

• The ‘List of Kinesis Streams’ report has been improved to now include Un/Tagged Resource filter options. This increased filtering is reflected in the summary charts along with report exports, and the related BPCs.
• Simplified and improved the Cost Savings report by removing unclear recommendations.
• Improved the Azure Reservation Billing Configuration report by adding a column to display the ‘RI Expiration Date’ for Azure CSP accounts.

Fixes

• Resolved a page size on the Audit History report where users weren’t able to properly adjust the page size.

29.7

Improvements

• Now including resource tag data for AWS Task Definitions service in the List of ECS Task Definitions report.
• Now including storage and month cost data in the List of DynamoDB Tables report. 
• Advanced Grouping now includes the ability to include the Paying Account ID & friendly name as a grouping option for AWS accounts and AWS MAVs. 
• Advanced Grouping now includes the ability to group by Regulation Type for AWS accounts. This will denote whether the account is associated to Commercial or GovCloud region.
• Tag Keys are now sorted alphabetically for the following reports: List of S3 Buckets, List of DynamoDB Tables, ECS Task Definition Detail

Bugs

• Improved EC2 CloudWatch metric ingestion that was causing incomplete data under certain scenarios.
• Resolved an issue on the Spend Analysis report where the drilldown options did not work. Users should now be able to drilldown into results for this report.
• Resolved an issue with the EC2 Instance Resize automation workflows. Users can now “Fix Now” EC2 Instance sizes via the “Utilization > Right Sizing” report.

Improvements

CloudCheckr is introducing two new system roles for MSP customers to help manage their child customers.

• Audit Access Management (L2 customers) - Allows the L1 user to view users, clients, roles and permission sets on any child customers. Also allows a user to view SAML providers, all accounts, account groups, MAVs, and account attributes. No reports or editing options are available.
• Read Only Role (L2 customers) - Allows a user to view any child customers and their reports. No permission to access management or customer management data.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

29.6

Improvements 

• Azure RI Recommendations are now available for MCA & EA projects
• Added support for new AWS Region - Asia Pacific (Melbourne) - ap-southeast-4.
• Added summary charts by both tagged and untagged resources on the “ECS Task Definition Detail Report”, “List of DynamoDB Report”, and “List of S3 Report”.
• Added visibility into both tagged and untagged resources for AWS Elastic Container Services on “List of Elastic Container Service” report. CloudCheckr also added support for the ECS resource type in the “Tagged Resources” page.

Bugs

• While in CMx, BPC filtered results do not honor the filter criteria when adjusting the number of results to display on the table. This now has been resolved.
• A horizontal scroll bar was erroneously present in dropdowns in Cost Allocator when viewed in CMx. This now has been resolved. Users may need to perform a hard refresh while on the page to see the update. Windows users can use the F5 key while targeting the browser to perform the hard refresh. Mac users can hit ⌘ + Shift + R while targeting the browser to perform a hard refresh.
• Dropdown arrow icons were missing in the Tag Mapping page when viewed in CMx. This now has been resolved. Users may need to perform a hard refresh while on the page to see the update.
• The BPC “Rotation Not Enabled For Customer Created CMKs For KMS Encryption” was giving false positives for customers regarding Asymmetric and External keys, which do not qualify for automatic rotation per AWS guidelines. This now has been resolved.

CMx Notification Bell Provides Credential Status and Notification Count

CloudCheckr had added a color-coded badge to the Notification Bell within CMx that indicates the state of the credential status for the selected account. 

• A blue badge indicates that the account credentials are valid, and new information has been retrieved regarding that account. 
• A yellow badge indicates that the credentials for that account are missing, and no data has been retrieved. 
• A red badge indicates that the credentials for that account are invalid. 

Additionally, a notification count will be displayed within the Notification Bell badge which tracks the total number of notifications.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

29.5

Improvements

• We have improved the calculation of Azure VM Recommendations for CSP and EA reports by basing estimates on the Retail Reservation rates.
• We have added support for the AWS RDS Multi-Availability Zone readable stand-by to Inventory Reports, Recommendations Reports, and RDS Instance Reports.
• Resource tag data is now visible within Untagged Resources for the AWS DynamoDB service.
• We have added DynamoDB Untagged Resources to the BPC list.
• We have improved the performance for BPC Untagged Resources.

Bugs

• We have fixed an issue where the List of EC2 Instances Report was displaying incorrect dates and listing dates out of order. 
• We have fixed an issue where the ‘All’ AWS Service Condition within Tag Mapping was not filtering the service list correctly.

Updated Cost Allocator Property Drop-Down List

CloudCheckr has added a filter to the Property drop-down list within the Cost Allocator. Additionally, the Property drop-down list is now sorted alphabetically for Azure and AWS.

Updated Tag Mapping Drop-Down List

CloudCheckr has added an option to the main page which allows Tag Keys and Tag Values to be filtered. A search box has also been added which will query all available Tag Keys and Tag Values. Additionally, the Tag Keys and Tag Values drop-down list is now sorted alphabetically for Azure and AWS. 

Improvements and Bug Fixes

29.4

Improvements

• We have added resource tag data visibility for the AWS DynamoDB service.
• We have added an accordion at the top of the Notifications Center for CMx which will provide information related to account health. A check that the associated account possess valid credentials will now be performed and displayed, along with a link to manage credentials. Billing data and a link to manage billing data is now displayed.
• We have added support for Store Classes Glacier Instant Retrieval, One Zone Infrequent Access, Intelligent Tiering, and Deep Archive within the S3 Summary Report Email.

Bugs

• We have fixed an issue with S3 Intelligent Tiering data miscalculating the cost by removing the S3 Intelligent Tiering storage class from S3 Summary.
• We have fixed an issue where large exports of Reserved Instances were not sending the CSV file or PDF to emails when on the list of EC2 Reserved Instance.
• We have fixed an issue where mismatching resource meters caused some SQL databases to not displaying within the SQL database rightsizing report.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

29.3

Improvements

• We have added the option to export large Reserved Instance Reports CSV files to email. CloudCheckr is now able to generate CSV files in the background and send the export link to the associated email inbox.
• We have added a new BPC to check for idle Azure elastic pools. 
• We have added a new section within the cost savings report which displays idle Azure elastic pools. 
• We have added support for One Zone - Infrequent Storage Class within S3 Cost and Detail reports.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where irrelevant data was displayed within exported RDS Utilization Summary PDFs. 
• We have fixed an issue where in some situations Reserved Instance Recommendation reports for EC2 were not populating any data.
• We fixed an issue where the price for AWS Glacier Deep Archive Unblended was being adjusted as a tiered service. We recommend reloading the data for the month of November to reflect the correct values within your bill.
• We fixed an issue where the Jira Integrations expand button within the Integrations settings would not complete the expansion action when selected.
• We fixed an issue where AWS Managed keys which had been automatically rotated were displaying within the CMK BPC.
• We fixed an issue where Saved Filter emails were not being sent from MAV. 
• We fixed an issue where CloudWatch Alarms reports grouped by AWS Account ID were unable to load.
• We fixed an issue where the AWS MAV Single Monthly Summary displayed daily costs instead of the month to date total.
• We fixed an issue where large API exports without designated start and end dates were submitting as 0 days, rather than the default 14 days.
• We fixed an issue where in some cases the Azure cost may have been categorized incorrectly.  This may have potentially affected Azure SQL Database or GRS Storage, although the reported cost totals were correct.

29.2

Improvements

• CloudCheckr now supports AWS Regions Europe (Spain) -eu-south-2, and Asia Pacific (Hydrabad) -ap-south-2.
• When Automation settings are configured to automatically process non-ignored items, it will no longer be dependent on the discovery job to request AWS to start/stop instances. The request will be made at the scheduled time.
• The edit_custom_billing_charge_monthly_percent_v2 API call will now update custom billing charges that are filtered by account family.
• Retail Rates are now used to calculate the cost of newer versions of RIs from the VM Recommendations.
• The Azure Discovery Job now supports DevTestConsumption prices for Inventory.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where the Single Month Summary Report was displaying invalid Savings Plans data.
• We fixed an issue where additional accounts were displaying as blank within RI recommendation reports.
• We fixed an issue where in some instances S3 Inventory Discovery did not successfully complete.
• We fixed an issue where Unknown Service Category displayed for some service categories.
• We fixed an issue where the MCA Azure Billing Collector was sometimes reporting that no accounts were available.

29.1 

Improvements

• We have added support for the Europe (Zurich) AWS Region.  
• We have added billing support for several new AWS S3 Storage Classes and Volume Types.
• We have added a text box above the Recommendations report to indicate that the provided estimates were based on Retail rates for both CSP and EA reports. This text box is visible to all account types which have access to the Recommendations report. Discounts obtained in the agreement with MS will not be taken into account in this report.
• We have added support to the Edit Billing Configuration report for collecting DevTest consumption offers.
• We have added support for the new Glacier Staging S3 Storage class.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where AWS L1 unlock did not unlock all corresponding L2s.
• We fixed an issue where setting MRU caused the scoped landing page within the app to load incorrectly. 
• We fixed an issue where the EC2 Instance Rightsizing export was not honoring Saved Filter criteria. 
• We fixed an issue where the menu text displayed for export functionality on Savings Plan Analytics report was incorrect. 

Updated CMx MAV Drawer Table

Cloudcheckr has updated the CMx MAV edit drawer so that users can view a list of accounts along with the credential status. Additionally, the Account name now contains a link connected to the accounts Edit drawer, which will allow for easier access when taking corrective actions.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

29.0

Improvements

• The Azure SQL servers UI now displays databases and elastic pools within the details.
• We improved RI recommendations in certain scenarios where data within Azure was not complete.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue within the CMx dashboards where data from the Advanced Grouping report became unavailable when attempting to print a chart.
• We fixed an issue where duplicate RDS storage snapshots would display with free allocation tags.
• We fixed an issue where some devtest subscriptions were incorrectly calculating hourly rates.

New Profit Analysis Dashboard Pane in CMx

CloudCheckr is introducing a new pane type called Profit Analysis which allows CMx users to view profit broken down in a variety of customizable ways. CMx users may view their profit by cloud account over a user configured timeline. The total cost is broken down by unblended cost and list cost, while the profit achieved is highlighted. CMx users may filter their results by Service Category and Resource Tags, and configure their preferred chart type. 

CMx users with access to both actual (unblended) cost and list cost may build a dashboard consisting of multiple Profit Analysis panes to break down their profit by several key Service Categories, and over various timelines. 

Retail Rate Calculation Without A Matching Retail Meter 

The process within CloudCheckr for calculating the Retail rate with Azure has been improved. Unfortunately in some cases Azure is not making available a meter and price, resulting in costs ingested with an unmatched Retail Meter being calculated at a rate of $0. 

To avoid this situation, when no matching Azure cost can be identified for a given meter to ingested, CloudCheckr is now passing through Azure Standard cost instead. This ensures that no Retail price will be represented at a lower value than the actual cost, helping those customers who invoice or recover costs based on Retail cost type.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

28.5

Improvements

• We are aware of an issue where the Advanced Grouping report crashes in a Chrome browser when generating large amounts of data, given Chrome’s lower memory limit vs other broswers. To work around this limitation, we recommend either using another browser in these large memory use conditions, or ordering the Group By fields with the ‘Location’ field before the ‘Resource Group’ field.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where the instance name within the instance details of exported EC2 Cost Details reports were not displayed.
• We fixed an issue where the Hours Running field within History by Virtual Machine displayed an inaccurate value.
• We fixed an issue where the MultiAZ value calculated for an RDS Reserve Instance was incorrect.
• We fixed an issue where Azure Cost savings values reported in MAV were inaccurate under certain conditions.