New Features

New AWS RI Recommendations, new Best Practice Checks  

CloudCheckr has built a new AWS RI Recommendation report for payer accounts that can be generated against the following services:  

• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) – For virtual server instances
• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) – For managed relational databases
• Amazon ElastiCache – For in-memory data caching
• Amazon OpenSearch Service – For search and analytics workloads
• Amazon Redshift – For data warehousing and analytics
• Amazon MemoryDB for Redis – For Redis-compatible in-memory databases
• Amazon DynamoDB – For NoSQL database workloads 

These recommendations will help you identify cost-saving opportunities by analyzing your historical usage and suggesting reservations that could reduce your on-demand spending. 

When generating these recommendations, the engine automatically excludes any instance usage that's already covered by existing Reserved Instances, Savings Plans or Spot Instances. This ensures that you receive recommendations only for the actual uncovered On-Demand usage. Specifically, EC2 RI recommendations are now aware of purchased savings plans and now take them into account during the recommendation process.  

If utilizing CMx, access the report by navigating to Home > Cost Savings > RI Recommendations. If utilizing Core, access the report by navigating to Cost > Reserved Usage > Recommendations > RI Recommendation. You can also search for RI Recommendations in the report search bar at the top of the application. 

This new report replaces the legacy RI Recommendations page, which had reduced levels of functionality relative to the new page.  

Prerequisites 

To get the new RI Recommendation page and the below BPCs to work as expected, the IAM Policy configured for your account must have the following permission: ce:GetReservationPurchaseRecommendation  

New Best Practice Checks  

Along with a new AWS RI Recommendations report, we are releasing several new Best Practice Checks (BPCs) to all customers (Core and CMx users) related to these newly supported services, and additionally have updated existing BPCs to utilize the new recommendation engine. 

New BPCs: 

• MemoryDB Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 
• OpenSearch Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 
• DynamoDB Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 

Updated BPCs: 

• RDS DB Instances Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 
• EC2 Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 
• ElastiCache Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 
• RedShift Reserved Instance Purchase Recommendations 

Other Improvements

• Added ability to configure exact days of monthly emails sent for Azure MAV reports; Billing Daily Summary & Billing Consolidated Summary

  
• Improved flexibility of get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_by_currency API date range query.

Bugs

• Resolved API issue for get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_by_currency where the start date couldn’t be set to before a project create date.

Cost Savings report improvements

• The cost savings report has been improved to clearly show where and how to achieve maximum savings. The page has been split into two possible monthly savings sections to highlight the recommended two-step approach to achieve optimal savings. 

  • The first step/section is targeting mis-provisioned resources that should be resolved first.
  • The second step/section is isolating RI purchase recommendations. After resolving all possible or desired mis-provisioned resources, it is recommended to wait 7 days before purchasing the RI recommendations. This allows the recommendation engine to adjust for new usage patterns.

• Now both RI and SP recommendations are pulled from AWS, and surfaced within the application at both L1 and optionally L2 directly-credentialed payers. 

  

Other Improvements

• Improved Credit handling for SPP credit sub-types. Previously, sub-types of SPP were not being captured in alignment with configuration of the SPP (Solution Provider Program) credit type.

• Improved the behavior of Azure RI and SP un-sharing as it relates to Force initial list cost to be based on Pay As You Go pricing configuration. The behavior is now consistent between both Asure RI and SP. If Force initial list cost to be based on Pay As You Go pricing is enabled, it will reset the list cost for all costs except for Reserved Instance and Savings Plan costs by default. If the user wishes to reset list cost for RI and SP, they will need to explicitly enable un-sharing for each of them.
  

  

Bugs

• Updated Cost BI CSV export to only include columns that are enabled on the table.
• Resolved an issue for Azure Advanced Grouping that generated an error when attempting to drilldown into the chart.
• Resolved an issue where billing data was not properly reloading for Azure GOV CSPs when Marketplace charges were found.

Improvements

• Added additional summary and detailed inventory reporting for AWS EKS and MSK services. These reports are available for both single-account and MAV reporting needs.
• Added support for Austria East region for Azure.

• Daily Cost Alerts now evaluate based on the “last day in the billing file at time of data ingestion minus one”.  This approach improves the reliability of alerts by ensuring that ingestion for a given day completes and the cost alert is evaluated properly against the defined criteria.  

  • For example, today is the 22nd, and the latest billing file ingestion completed included data from the 21st. The alert would thus evaluate and fire an alert on data from the 20th to ensure the full day of data is evaluated for the alert.

• Correction from last release note: We incorrectly reported on a new property to the get_account_Family_v2 API endpoint. We have updated the release note to the following:

  • An associated API endpoint, get_account_Family_v2, has been updated to include a new boolean property, "DefaultAccountFamily": True, to define if the family is default or not.

Bugs

• Resolved an issue introduced by Azure unexpectedly updating the format of ReservationOrderId which prevented Azure Reservation Purchases from being reported. Customers might need to reload June data for accurate cost data.
• Resolved an issue where ‘Not Set’ resource group text was missing from generated invoices.
• Resolved an issue where List of VMs was not reporting on VMs belonging to a Scale Set.
• Resolved an issue where the BPC report and snapback reports would not load for MAV and all account types.
• Resolved an issue where several APIs would unexpectedly return a 400 - Project Is Not Credentialed error when querying for a date range that contained valid data.
• Resolved an issue where an Azure MAV change monitoring report included results from AWS resources.
• Addressed an issue when accessing the binoculars when attempting to create a new custom charge page, became unresponsive 

Improvements

• Added the ability to ignore individual resources for Azure BPCs

  • While reviewing a Best Practice Check failure in an Azure Subscription, you can choose to ignore a specific resource for future consideration by clicking on the visibility icon to the right of the resource name.

• Configurable monthly Best Practice Summary & Consolidated Billing Summary emails for AWS MAVs

  • While in an AWS MAV, go to the Settings menu in the top right corner of the application. Account Configuration > Email Settings

• Added the ability to define a default account family for a payer. This will allow any new sub-accounts that are identified by the application to be automatically assigned to that default account family.

  • This setting can be found on the account family configuration page.

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  • Note: Only one account family per payer can be set as the default.
  • An associated API endpoint, get_account_Family_v2, has been updated to include a new boolean property, "DefaultAccountFamily": True, to define if the family is default or not.

Bugs

• Resolved an issue where RI Historical Savings report was not reporting all purchased RIs.
• Resolve an issue where Cost BI and Advanced Grouping CSV exports contained the incorrect year format when grouping by year.
• Resolved an issue where Azure usage costs were not being appropriately assigned to configured Department Names within CloudCheckr.

Improvements

• It is now possible to automatically lock a billing month upon identification of both the Invoice ID and AWS Marketplace ID, to ensure that all Marketplace charges are included in a given month. This is an optional project-level configuration setting.
  The default will continue to be “automatically lock the month upon identification of just the Invoice ID” while the new ability allows customers to require the Marketplace Invoice ID to have been written, as well as the traditional invoice number. 
  

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue where users were unable to update custom usage rates, as the button would gray out but didn't save the changes.
• Resolved an issue where some customers were receiving a 502 Bad Gateway response when attempting to retrieve saved filters via API.

RDS Rightsizing Report 

• Users can now identify rightsizing opportunities for RDS. With this new report, users can filter by various input parameters, including:

  • Idle Instance
  • Provisioned Status (e.g., "Under-provisioned," "Optimized," "Over-provisioned")
  • Provisioned Status Justification (e.g., "Memory under-provisioned...")
  • Idle (True/False)
  • Tag Key and Tag Value
  • Lookback Period (7 days, 14 days, 30 days)
• Users can find the report in the left navigation menu under Resources > RDS Utilization > Right Sizing

Other Improvements 

• Users can now optionally send Advanced Grouping CSV reports as email attachments, allowing recipients to access the reports without the need to log in to the application. To configure, select Email Report in Advanced Grouping, and then select “Make Available without Authentication” and the configured report will be available to anyone with the link.

• Help text for Tier Compression now clarifies that S3 costs are tiered per region.

Bug Fixes

• Recent slower data ingestion performance has been improved.
• Addressed an issue preventing EC2 cost summary report from successfully running. 
• Fixed an issue preventing Friendly Names from being updated properly. 
• Addressed an issue preventing Saved Filters in certain Azure subscriptions from being updated.  
• Solved an issue where the Azure get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_by_currency API call returned no data (instead returning 202, indicating that data needed to be refreshed). 
• Fixed an issue with the AWS OpenSearch RI Inventory page preventing the reporting RIs at the Payer and Payee levels. 

Improvements 

• Tax may now be specified as a part of List Cost calculations. 

This calculated tax can be transferred to an MSP’s L2, and L2s can also calculate and apply Tax using this same List Cost. 

• Note the new section within the Add a Custom Billing Charge “Add a percent discount or premium tax line item” 

  • The custom billing charge creates an additional single charge or credit based on the specified percentage charge (or discount) of the total amount, where the Description (Max length = 100 characters) is used to label the charge on the invoice. 

• Cost Spend Alerts may now be configured for negative spend (i.e. dip in spend) changes in both AWS and Azure 

  • Access via Alert Manager, Cost, and create a New Alert – enter a negative number or negative percentage on which to alert. 
• Savings Plan Analytics can now be enabled / disabled at each L2 customer, based on a configuration setting at the L1. 
• “Yearly" is now a group-by option in Advanced Grouping for both AWS and Azure, and is also supported by Saved Filters. 

• Family IDs are now more widely available in the UI and API. 

  • For AWS we now

    • Display the Account Family ID in the UI.

    • API updates:

      • get_invoice_v2

        • added family_id parameter in return
        • optional family_id parameter added

      • get_account_family

        • added family_id parameter in return
        • optional family_id parameter added

      • modify_account_family

        • optional family_id parameter added

      • delete_account_family

        • optional family_id parameter added

  • For Azure, we now

    • Display the Subscription Family ID in the UI.

    • API updates:

      • get_subscription_family    

        • added family_id parameter in return
        • optional family_id parameter added

      • create_subscription_family    

        • family_id generated on the return

      • modify_subscription_family

        • optional family_id parameter added

      • delete_subscription_family

        • optional family_id parameter added 

Bug Fixes

• Solved an issue that excluded usages from the Savings Plan Unsharing calculation only when the operation field in the CUR is empty, noted in Lambda usages.  
• Addressed an issue preventing the Untagged Resource report from running with very large datasets.     
• Resolved an issue seen when creating AWS Custom Charges, where the checkboxes for Include Savings Plan Negation Credits in Calculation and Include All Other Credits in Calculation could be out of sync with selections made in the Transaction Type dropdown. 
• Solved an issue preventing successful execution of the API call used to pull Azure cost data from the platform (get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_by_currency) when requesting large datasets from more than 18 months in the past.  
• EU compliance checkbox has been restored after failing to display after saving an edit to a saved filter scheduled invoice in Core and CMx. 
• AWS Professional Service charges are now reflected in the proper service category in Advanced Grouping. 
• Addressed an issue where Generate Total Tax configuration was not properly applying to scheduled invoices.
• Resolved an issue where the Azure API get_detailed_billing_with_grouping_by_currency was not working in a customer-defined MAV. 
• Fixed an issue in AWS Cost Reports which caused the RI Purchase by Frequency report to redirect to an error. 
• Solved an issue where making any changes on the Credits by Account tab would cause existing credit configurations to revert back to hidden, preventing stacked updates.

Savings Plan Analytics at the L2 

• Savings Plan Analytics are now available to L2 customers through the CMx UI
  Savings Plan Analytics allow customers to identify their coverage, cost, savings, utilization, and waste. The report allows you to see these trends over 1, 3, 6, or 12 month timeframes to gauge the effectiveness of your Savings Plans against your resource fleet. See additional details in this Success Center article.

Improvements 

• "Generate Total Tax" has been added to the “Edit schedule Invoice” page

• New Best Practice Check for Idle EFS Shares is now available, which detects when there are no input/output operations being performed on the file system

  • Access via Resources → EC2 Utilization → Idle Instances
• Cost Savings Report has been enhanced to surface idle EFS Shares for possible cost savings opportunities
• Unused Load Balancer BPC has been improved to support the case that Network load balancers can have Application load balancers as targets
• Enhanced RI Unsharing to support AWS Elasticache size flexibility rules, which has also been updated in platform Inventory and Recommendations reports, as documented in New – Size flexibility for Amazon ElastiCache reserved nodes | Amazon Web Services   
• OpenSearch reservation support has been expanded to the Inventory, Unsharing, Amortization, Cost Savings and Recommendations reports 

Bug Fixes

• Solved a corner case when "Inherit Tags to Payee" is selected which intermittently preventing Advanced Grouping reports and Cost BI Exports from successfully completing 
• Addressed a discrepancy in Saving Plan Analytics where MTD Utilization was improperly visualized
• Resolved an issue where the Unused Elastic Load Balancers BPC that had a registered target of an Application load balancer was incorrectly reported as a Cost Savings opportunity

Improvements 

• Enhanced the “Generate Unique Invoice ID” workflow options to support suppress or show the Unique Invoice ID, as well as to allow the user to enter a custom Invoice ID of their choosing: 

  • Unchecked - Do not show Unique Invoice ID label and Value is blank (Default value) 

  • Checked - Show text box that populates Random value with description or help icon that describes that user can enter the value of their choice

    
    
    
    

• The get_invoice_v2 API now supports enable/suppress the Unique Invoice ID

  • show_unique_invoice_id : true/false - optional
  • unique_invoice_id : alphanumeric should be between 1-10 character - optional
• Users may now optionally decide Inherit / not Inherit Tags from Payer to Payee at the Project level
• Azure Savings Plan purchases for Legacy and Modern CSP are now captured and reported in Advanced Grouping and One Time Charge configuration pages

Bug Fixes

• Addressed an issue when the API call “get_detailed_billing_grouped_pdf” does not complete when using a CMx bearer token (worked with Core API key). 
• Resolved an issue preventing the AWS List of Workspaces inventory report from successfully reporting, only when the Directory Type is reported as null from AWS. 
• Fixed an issue with Cost BI | Export which indicated that certain email addresses are invalid when they are a functional email addresses. 

Improvements 

• "Usage Type" Filter has been added as a filter to the "Custom Usage Rates" page in CloudCheckr.
  
• CloudCheckr-generated Invoices now contain a unique numerical identifier as well as a Project Code, which are newly able to be called as part of Get_Invoice_V2 API calls. 
• Added support for Azure’s Spain Central region. 

Bug Fixes

• Addressed an issue preventing successful reconsent with an existing MCA project in CloudCheckr. 
• Solved an issue which appeared when trying to access the IoT list of things report with very large datasets. 
• Resolved an issue preventing Azure CSP Multi-Account Views (MAVs) from properly building. 
• Addressed an issue with Savings Plan Unsharing that was causing account owned savings plans to be incorrectly unshared.  
• Resolved an issue with Cost BI exports not successfully sending to email addresses containing certain punctuation characters. 
• Solved an issue preventing Assigned Credits at the L1 not appearing in the L2 after finalization.