Improvements

• Several enhancements have been added to the Invoice Generator functionality.

  • When manually recreating an invoice, users now have the ability to select which month they want to recreate.
    
    

    

     

  • On the Historical Invoice page, users will now see columns that give additional context to the invoice that was generated. 

    • Saved Filter - If the invoice is configured from a saved filter, this will display the name of the saved filter.
    • Margin % - This will indicate the overall margin of the invoice created, as defined by (“List Cost” - “Unblended Cost” ) / “Unblended Cost” * 100

    • Status - This will indicate the date that the invoice was sent if it was successfully generated.

      
      
      

• When generating a large export from Advanced Grouping Report, users now have an option to give the export a custom name.

Bugs

• Resolved an issue for MAV Best Practice Check assessment results that prevented all child account assessments from being included in the larger MAV assessment.

• Resolved an issue where AWS Custom Usage Rates configured within CloudCheckr were impacting Free Tier $0 rows.

Improvements

• Scheduled invoice view has been improved through the addition of the Group By column, where we added additional details to improve identification of invoice details.
  
  

  

   

• Advanced Grouping email configuration has improved in-app help text to clarify the expected email behavior when configured from this screen. 

Bugs

• Resolved an issue where the data export for the Reserved Instance Recommendation report was exporting as a JSON, instead of a csv as expected.
• Resolved an issue that prevented some users from expanding scheduled invoices to view and edit details.
• Addressed an issue that prevented some customers from disabling the single-month consolidated billing summary email.
• Resolved a bug with API edit_custom_billing_charge_percent_all_charges_v3, which prevented API users from editing existing custom charges.
• Solved an issue that occurred when generating PDF invoices from saved filters that included certain group-by conditions, resulting in unexpected formatting issues.

Improvements

• User Experience updates to the RI Recommendations and Cost Savings reports.

  • Updated default columns to include “Instances to Purchase,” which describes the total number of recommendations to purchase per instance type. This column remains available on the CSV export (which also contains additional columns not in the UI).
  • Improved readability of certain data points.
  • Enhanced in-app help text to clarify differences between real-time RI Recommendations (pulled directly from AWS Cost Explorer) and snapshot-based Cost Savings reports, including details on data freshness and assessment criteria.

  • Added proactive in-app notification banners on the CMx Dashboard and Core BPC pages to alert users when their IAM policy is missing the required ce:GetReservationPurchaseRecommendation permission needed for the new RI Recommendation page and BPCs, guiding users to update their IAM policy to access the latest recommendations.

    • Updated logic ensures that only accounts with the correct permissions and feature enablement will display BPCs and recommendations.
  • RI Recommendation BPCs are now hidden (not shown as green/passing) when required permissions are missing or the feature is not enabled, preventing misleading results.

Bugs

• Resolved an issue where the RI recommendations report would export results to a JSON file rather than a CSV as expected.
• Resolved an issue for monthly emails configured from a saved filter that prevented the email from being sent if the month was not yet finalized.
• Resolved an issue where, when a default account family is enabled, the auto-assign feature was failing to successfully assign new accounts to that default account family.

Improvements

• Filter capabilities for Azure One-Time Charge report has been enhanced. Users are now able to filter down this report to view targeted charges.
• Added support for the value Transaction Type for the parameter of filter_type to the create_detailed_billing_grouped_filter_v2 API response.

Bugs

• Resolved an issue that prevented scheduled Daily Emails from being sent out consistently.
• Addressed an issue on the Cost BI report where adding Tag Keys would remove the cost columns from the export of the report.
• Resolved an issue that prevented users from saving new or making updates to CMx Dashboards.
• Resolve an issue that prevented newly discovered accounts from being applied to the Default Account Family automatically.

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.