Improvements

• To clarify the List Cost display on the Billing and Cost Management Dashboard, we are now summarizing all charges between -.01 and .01 (currently displayed as 0) into “Others” and then we display the aggregate cost of these very small costs in “Others”. Previously some very small value services would be displayed as “0 when in fact they represented cost that had been rounded down to 0. 

• Program Credit Management has been enhanced to more flexibly hide or show credits. There are now two scenarios:

  • “Hide Credits from Payees” is selected, which then allows the user to select which credit types should be SHOWN to the owner in the Assign credits screen. 
  • “Hide Credits from Payees” is not selected, which then allows the user to select which credit types should be HIDDEN from the owner in the Assign Credits screen.

CASE 1: “Hide Credits from Payees” is selected:

• For cases when Azure is reporting duplicate / ambiguous VM Reservation data, CloudCheckr is correctly capturing the cost, even though the Service Category is set to Unknown for these ambiguous reservations.
  Customers who wish to capture all Service Category data for VM reservations may now do so by providing CloudCheckr with the Reservation Order Reader role, which is accomplished by following steps through Permissions to view and manage Azure reservations - Microsoft Cost Management 

Bug Fixes

• Azure MCA Marketplace charges are now being fully collected and reported. 

Improvements

• AWS Billing Collector performance has been improved; specific customer impact will depend upon the cost features used (Unsharring, Assign Credits, etc.).
• For Azure Reservations, it is now possible to configure an email notification when the reservations cannot be set according to the desired priorities in the RI Reservation Billing Configuration page.
  Email will be with a csv indicating a list by Billing Month of those reservations that are in NOT SET status. Below is a sample of email and the attachment.

Bug Fixes

• Solved an issue preventing AWS cost ingestion in certain cases when Assign Credits was in use.  
• Addressed an issue in Reservation Billing Configuration where a Reservation that had been cancelled was still displaying, even when choosing Show only active Purchase Orders.  
• Savings Plan Analytics now correctly reports on Savings Plans for SageMaker and other non-compute Savings Plans. 
• Solved an issue to allow new payee accounts to be placed automatically in the same Parent Group as of Payer.
• Solved an issue where AWS BC creates duplicate entries for unassigned credits, which causes errors when unassigned credits are later assigned.

Improvements

• Added support for Azure EA agreements migrating to MCA within CloudCheckr Multi-Account Views (MAVs). 

Bug Fixes

• Addressed an issue with Licenses Charges for Azure PayGo subscriptions not being ingested.
• Solved an issue with the Azure Rightsizing Recommendation Report related to standard E-Series VMs.
• Fixed an issue with Best Practice Check “Ensure routing tables for VPC” which was providing duplicate data, and the link for “List of” was broken. 
• Fixed an issue where Charts in the RI Recommendations PDF Export were not matching (or were blank) the graphs in each result of the UI report. 
• Addressed a scenario where a negative custom charge value was created in its own service category, and was not reporting correctly in the single month summary report. 
• Resolved an issue with the Service Now integration not working properly in our High Security environment. 

Report Deprecation

• Cloud HSM reports have been deprecated. 

Release Notes 34.6

34.6 Improvements

• Added the option to provide a fallback fee assignment option within the Azure Reservation Configuration page (CMx UI: choose Billing/Configure/Reservation Billing Configuration)

  

• Clarified within the UI the specific ways that Uncompress Pricing Tier works 

34.6 Bug Fixes

• Addressed a Cost Saving Report issue (in Core UI only) would not display all results in a MAV  
• Fixed an issue preventing Azure Monthly Saved Filter emails for MAVs from being sent

Release Notes 34.5 - April 29th, 2024

34.5 Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue preventing certain Trusted Advisor Checks from appearing 
• Resolved an issue where the Best Practice Check “Ensure routing tables for VPC peering are "least access"” check was incorrectly reporting with duplicates.
• Addressed an issue preventing programmatic invoice scheduling in AWS when using the API call “schedule_invoice” 

Improvements

• Support for Azure Israel Central region has been added
• It is now possible to edit each condition in Cost Allocator to update conditions as needed

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue where Last Login data was omitted from AWS List of Workspaces in the CSV export
• Addressed a scenario where Cost BI would fail to return data when filtering for “contains” using tag values if the volume of tags was very large 
• Fixed an issue where advanced grouping for Azure MCA did not reflect the Instance ID
• Addressed an issue where Cost BI $0 costs were included when “Include Zero Costs” was left unchecked
• The Manage Emails page in CMx now loads consistently 

Improvements

• Cost Allocator now supports the ability to match the exact ResourceID property. New options include “Match Key Exactly” and “Match Value Exactly.”

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue with the Azure edit_account_email_settings_v2 API call, which was returning an error code even when successful.
• Resolved an issue with the Azure create_subscription_family api was failing, incorrectly indicating the subscription is already assigned a subscription family – even though the subscription was not already in a subscription family. 
• Addressed a scenario where the Retail Cost for Azure Maps was not taking the free tier into consideration; feature request created with Microsoft to provide this information as part of their API response. 
• Resolved an issue where duplicate projects with the same AWS Account ID or Azure Subscription ID were incorrectly allowed to be created.
• Addressed an inconsistency between the EC2 RI Inventory vs EC2 Cost Summary when reporting the Total Instances Unused. 

Release Notes 34.2

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an inconsistency which caused a CSV export credential status to not match the UI status.
• Resolved an issue where Azure VM inventory was not populating correctly when license type UBUNTU_PRO and UBUNTU was used. 
• Resolved an issue where Savings Plan Analytics was reporting “There was a problem getting the Inventory data” and the section became blank.

Release Notes 34.0 and 34.1 - February 29th, 2024

Improvements

• Transaction Type filter is now available in the Custom Billing Charges Report.

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue where Savings Plan Analytics returned “There was a problem getting inventory data”. 
• Resolved an issue where “export users” CSV was failing.
• Addressed an issue where account level tags were not populating successfully.
• Resolved an issue where some Azure CSP spend was failing to ingest. 

NEW: Cost BI – Data Analysis Tool

We’ve added a new capability called Cost BI (Business Intelligence) to surface more granular detail regarding cost and usage within your cloud bill. In CMx, find Cost BI under the Cost menu.

With Cost BI, we have introduced a more robust solution to analyzing cost data. With this tool, users have more granular visibility on items (Accounts, Services, Descriptions, etc.) that can appear without needing to sort by a group by. Make changes in real time, move things around fluidly and dynamically, and see updates in real time. Users have the ability to load a dashboard and then drill into and analyze the details. 

Users can see multiple cost types side-by-side (IF user has access to multiple cost types), and quickly drill into your costs and the services that are generating them.  

NOTE: File Exports (csv format) are streamlined, omitting null data. Each item is now filled with relevant data in the Group-By, avoiding white space and simplifying downstream analysis you might conduct in Excel or other BI tools. 

Support Desk Update

CloudCheckr Technical Support is now using Zendesk as the primary ticket management system, helping us provide an improved support experience while also streamlining support across the Spot product portfolio, including Spot Security and the upcoming Billing Engine and Cost Intelligence products. 

Continue to contact our technical support team as usual:

1. Click on Contact Support from the Success Center
2. Send an email to support@cloudcheckr.com
3. Call our support directly at +1 (585) 397-3200, Monday – Friday, 8 AM to 9 PM Eastern Time
   (NOTE: this is a new phone number as of Jan 1st, 2024)

For those tickets created on January 22nd and beyond, CloudCheckr Technical Support responses will come from support@cloudcheckrspot.zendesk.com. Please be sure to add this email to your approved senders list.  All technical support tickets opened prior to January 22 will continue to be updated and managed in our legacy ticketing system (Jira Service Desk). 

Please send a message to support@cloudcheckr.com if you have any questions or feedback.

Improvements

• We have added the Transaction Type filter to the Custom Usage Rates report, allowing users to add boundaries based on transaction type that will impact certain rates. 
• We improved the EC2 cost summary report where we now show total unused reserved cost and unused reserve instance count that reflects more accurately the RI usage overview in an account.

Bug Fixes

• Addressed an issue with Azure cost ingestion being prevented, if on the previous run no new cost data was available. 
• Resolved an issue where the Azure Cost (Percent) alert did not display any tag keys when Filter By: Lookup tags is selected. 
• Addressed a scenario where customers could not create a new dashboard pane for Cost Monthly Summary type that included Azure Payees. 
• When using List Cost Analysis, we restored presenting the L2 RI unused hours line item.