Before anyone can begin using the Cloud Cost Management (CCM) (formerly Optimize) functionality, an administrator needs to configure at least one Cloud Service Provider (CSP) integration. See the following content in Virtana Platform Administration:
Configuring an AWS Integration
Configuring an Azure Integration
Any administrator can invite other users to an organization for your company. Invited users receive an email invitation with a link to Virtana Platform. See Logging in to Virtana Platform in the Virtana Platform Administration guide.
Ensure you are running Virtana Platform on a supported browser: Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge.
After logging in to the platform, you can access your Profile to select which page in CCM you want to be your default landing page when you log in. See Managing Your Profile and User Settings in the Virtana Platform Administration guide.
It can be useful to review some of the terminology and concepts specific to CCM before you start to run reports.
Some terms used in Virtana Platform are common words but with meanings specific to the module being used.
Following are terms used in the context of Virtana Platform that you should be familiar with.
- amortized costs
-
Distributes any up-front fees and monthly installments evenly across the reservation period.
- attribute
-
Metadata created and assigned by your cloud service provider (CSP) that defines a property of a resource. You can use attributes in Virtana Platform to filter items to include in or exclude from a report.
- blended costs
-
The averaged rates of the reserved and on-demand instances that are shared by multiple member accounts. The blended view recognizes relative usage of reserved instances, so accounts that make more use of reserved instances are allocated a higher proportion of those overall costs.
- change request
-
The ability to submit ticket requests to modify your CSP environment based on recommendations from Idle Resources or Right Sizing Reports. The requests are configured as part of a policy in Cloud Cost Management and submitted to a change management system, such as Jira or ServiceNow.
- cloud service provider (CSP)
-
A company that offers cloud-based services and solutions. Examples are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Also called cloud provider.
- compute instance
-
An individual instance of a virtual machine (VM) or a physical server node that can be associated with an application or a move group (in Workload Placement). A compute instance can belong to only one application or move group.
- consolidated billing
-
The grouping of multiple accounts into a single billing account, with one main "parent" account and related linked "children" for billing purposes. The child account information rolls up to the parent account. Equivalent to an AWS "organization".
- Cost Explorer
-
A visualization tool that provides a view of your spend across different AWS Services. Use to get a clearer perspective of weekly, monthly, and quarterly spending trends for your business.
- data source
-
An integration instance (such as AWS, Azure, or GCP), with an associated billing account. The billing account can represent a single account or multiple accounts, if doing consolidated billing.
- entity
-
Equates to an entity in VirtualWisdom.
- global report filter
-
Also called global filter. User-customized filters (tags and attributes) applied to data sources. They can be used to segment environments to identify savings within a subset of your environment.
- GovCloud
-
GovCloud is an AWS cloud offering that restricts administrative access to U.S. citizens only. The region meets the requirements for U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and allows users to move Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) into the cloud. See the official AWS Guide for more information.
- IAM role
-
An IAM role is an AWS identity with associated permissions policies. This role is used by Virtana Platform to communicate with AWS. The role provides temporary security credentials that only apply for the role session.
- in-line policy
-
A user-created and user-managed AWS policy that you can embed in a single user, group, or role in AWS.
- Management Account Permissions
-
Grants read-only access to collect billing files from a single AWS S3 bucket that can be located in a management account.
- Minimal Cost Permissions
-
Grants read-only access to collect CloudWatch performance metrics and billing files. It is limited to only the AWS services for which Virtana Platform Cloud Cost Management provides cost reports.
- organization
-
The entity under which specific workloads are grouped for migration and optimization, and to which a user and projects belong. An organization typically equates to a company, but can relate to a business unit of a company, etc
- policy
-
Configuration parameters that a user can apply to a data source. In Cloud Cost Management, policies define the optimization constraints for Idle Resources and Right Sizing reports.
- resource
-
Any compute instance, storage object, networking device, or other entity that can be created or configured within the CSP platform.
- Scope of Analysis
-
The policy parameter that allows you to select which instances or entities (scope) the policy applies to. Settings include the CSP data source and applicable filters.
- Standard Permissions
-
Grants blanket read-only access to collect CloudWatch performance metrics and billing files from AWS S3.
- tag
-
A key/value pair or simple string used as an organizational label applied to resources. You create tags in your cloud service provider account.
- unblended costs
-
The sum of the applicable rates times usage (rates x usage) for each shared resource in consolidated accounts. Unblended costs represent the usage costs on the day they are charged to you.
- Virtana Platform
-
A cloud-agnostic SaaS platform offered by Virtana that is composed of multiple modules to help migrate, optimize, and manage workloads in cloud and hybrid environments.
- Workload Placement module
-
Workload Placement is a module in Virtana Platform that de-risks and accelerates application or workload migrations for public or private clouds.
The following tables display the entity types and associated icons that you might see in Cloud Cost Management (CCM) reports.
Generic
|
Entity Type |
Entity Icon |
Associated with... |
|---|---|---|
|
Container |
 |
Kubernetes |
|
Pod |
 |
Kubernetes |
Microsoft Azure (Azure)
|
Entity Type |
Entity Icon |
Associated with... |
|---|---|---|
|
Azure disk |
 |
Block-level storage volume |
|
Azure VM |
 |
Virtual machine |
|
Application gateway |
 |
Incoming application traffic |
|
Public IP |
 |
Static IP |
|
Load balancer |
 |
Traffic distribution for availability |
|
AKS cluster |
 |
Kubernetes cluster |
|
AKS virtualnode pod |
 |
Kubernetes pod |
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
|
Entity Type |
Entity Icon |
Associated with... |
|---|---|---|
|
EBS |
 |
Elastic block store |
|
EC2 |
 |
Elastic compute cloud |
|
ECS |
 |
Elastic container service |
|
Elastic IP |
 |
Elastic IP address |
|
ELB |
 |
Elastic load balancing |
|
RDS |
 |
Relational database service |
|
S3 |
 |
Simple storage service |
|
EKS cluster |
 |
Elastic Kubernetes service cluster |
|
Fargate pod |
 |
Kubernetes serverless pod |
Cost categories are based on the categories used by your cloud provider. Cloud Cost Management (CCM) uses regular expression pattern matching to identify cost categories for Azure and AWS.
Cost categories in Azure are associated with meter instances. Meters are used to track resource usage over time. Meter usage records are used to calculate your bill in Azure.
Each meter has classification categories, such as bandwidth, virtual machine license, etc. Each billing charge in Azure is associated with a meter, a category, and a meter subcategory. CCM uses these meters, categories, and sometimes subcategories to calculate costs.
For example, Data Transfer costs in CCM combine network costs from the meter categories bandwidth and virtual network.
Other cost categories for Azure include SQL Server License, Windows Server, and Unknown.
The cost category Unknown includes any costs that are not identified as Data Transfer, SQL Server License, Windows Server, or Reserved Instance.
AWS cost categories are based on patterns found in AWS reports. For Right Sizing and Cost vs Utilization, CCM uses the AWS Cost and Usage Report file. For Bill Analysis, CCM uses Cost Explorer.
Most categories are self-explanatory. However, two categories that warrant further explanation are Other and Unknown.
Other is an actual AWS category that includes costs for EBS Optimized, Elastic IP, and CPU Credits usage.
The cost category Unknown includes any cost categories that CCM does not associate with an AWS category.
See the Matching Conditions options in Cost vs Utilization Report Settings for lists of AWS cost categories. If modifications are needed to categories in Cloud Cost Management, contact Virtana Support.
To establish truly meaningful cost management, you need to see what’s happening from a workload perspective and understand spend from a business perspective. You can better achieve this by using tags. Tags allow you to filter, group, and stack data to identify trends and report on usage by individual cost center.
The tags used in Virtana Platform must be created in your cloud service provider (CSP) account. Tags can be user-defined or they can be generated by your CSP. Virtana Platform identifies all the tags available from your CSP and makes them available in the Virtana Platform modules.
Tip
To use the AWS generated cost allocation tags, a management account owner must activate it in the Billing and Cost Management console.
For detailed information about creating and using tags, see your cloud provider documentation.
In some CSPs, tags are key/value pairs and in others they are simple strings. Either way, you use tags to categorize your resources. For example:
-
You might categorize your storage based on protected health information, or by project, by corporate department, etc.
-
You can use tags to categorize by security classification to control access to batch operations.
-
You can identify specific aspects of a resource using tags, such as associated applications, projects, or infrastructure components, then build reports in Virtana Platform based on those tags.
Related Topics
Learning the basics of in-app filtering enables you to easily create or edit widgets, reports, and policies, as well as filter metrics and alerts.
There are several types of filtering options in Cloud Cost Management (CCM). Inclusion and exclusion filters can be used together to include some items, but exclude others. You can also use the any/all option to determine whether some or all of the identified items are included or excluded.
Additionally, you can create report filters that consist of one or more data sources and any tag or attribute filters you assign to the data sources.
For resource groups, you can select from tags associated with the accounts that are included in the group.
All of these filter types can be used together or separately.
Inclusion filters limit the scope of your search results to a set of items matching a given criteria.
This filter is best used when you have a few, specific items you want selected.
Inclusion filters can be set as part of an AWS integration configuration, and used in conjunction with report filters.
Inclusion Filter Options
-
Tag: A dropdown multi-select of all tags; includes a search field and any/all option.
-
Attribute: A dropdown multi-select of all attributes; includes a search field and any/all option.
Exclusion filters limit the scope of your search results to everything except the selected items that match a given criteria. For example, excluding the App tag VPN would return a list of all elements that do not include the VPN tag.
This filter is best used when you want the bulk of given elements available, except for those with certain attributes or tags.
Exclusion filters can be set as part of an AWS integration configuration, and used in conjunction with report filters.
Exclusion Filter Options
-
Exclude Tag: A dropdown multi-select of all excludable tags; includes a search field and any/all option.
-
Exclude Attribute: A dropdown multi-select of all excludable attributes; includes a search field and any/all option.
Any vs All Filters are available as an option with include and exclude filters in Virtana Platform. You must select Tag or Attribute values from multiple categories (keys) from the dropdown before the Any/All option displays.
These filters are converse, so only one can be enabled at a time. You can select multiple tags or attributes. Search results then return entities that include or exclude any of the selected filter items (boolean OR operator) or entities that include or exclude all selected filter items (AND operator).
For example, you might want to display information about a specific node that contains a specific application that resides within one of two regions:
-
For Tag:
The category (key) Name with a value of node2 AND the category App with value DNS, with the All option selected.
-
For Attribute:
Assigned the category (key) jRegion with the values eu-west-1 and eu-west-2, with the ANY option selected.
Any vs All Options
-
Tag: A dropdown multi-select of all tags; includes a search field and any/all option.
-
Attribute: A dropdown multi-select of all attributes; includes a search field and any/all option.
Report filters are user-customized filters that are associated with reports in an organization. You can use these filters to segment environments to identify savings within a subset of your environment.
To create a report filter, you select one or more integration data sources and assign tags and attributes to those instances. Any linked child data sources are automatically assigned to the filter, but can be deselected. The filters are persistent and globally accessible to anyone with access to the organization containing the report filter.
Report filters provide greater efficiency, as you can create standard filtering configurations once and then select them from a dropdown list on any tab in CCM .
A default report filter named All Cloud Entities includes all available cloud resources. You cannot change or delete this default filter. However, you can modify it and save the changes under a new filter name. The user-configured filters are editable and can be deleted.
Attributes for report filters are limited to Account (Linked_Account), Region and Availability Zone for AWS.
After creating a report filter, you can also apply other temporary filters, such as include/exclude filters, to create a variety of reports.
Related Topics
Report filters are created by users from within the Virtana Platform console. These filters allow you to assign include or exclude filters, by tags or attributes, to one or more data sources. The filters are globally available across Cloud Cost Management (CCM). Saved report filters are also persistent across pages.
About This Task
To create a report filter, you must modify and save an existing filter. You can start with the default All Cloud Entities report filter, or select another user-defined report filter.
Prerequisites
You should be familiar with the use of tags and attributes in CCM before creating or editing report filters.
See Filtering in Virtana Platform and Filtering and Grouping Options for more information.
Steps
-
Log in to Virtana Platform, access the CCM module, and navigate to any page.
-
Select a report Filter and click Edit.
You can use the default All Cloud Entities filter or any user-defined filter.
-
On the filter configuration form, select one or more data sources.
You can combine data sources from different cloud provider integrations.
When you select a primary data source, any linked child resources are also included.
-
Select the tags or attributes to be included or excluded.
Tip
If you are modifying a filter and that filter is used by any scheduled reports, a notice appears at the bottom of the form, so you are aware that any changes will affect those reports.
-
Click Apply and close the form.
Note that the filter name now displays with (Modified) after it.
-
Click the filter Save icon and select Save as a New Filter or Update This Filter.
Be careful not to modify someone else's report filter.
After saving, the new report filter displays in the Filter field and can be accessed from any report filter field in CCM.
-
To edit the name of the report filter (
) or to delete a filter (
), click the Filter dropdown and hover over the report name to see the relevant icons.
You can filter and group report data from any Cloud Cost Management (CCM) page. The filtering, grouping, and other related options are listed below, identified by the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) they apply to. If a specific CSP is not identified for a specific option, then the option is available for all CSPs.
Grouping Options
Data Filtering Options
-
Services
-
AWS: All available AWS services, such as EC2, Lambda, ELB, etc.
-
Azure: Virtual Machine, Virtual Network, Bandwidth, Storage
-
-
Cost Attributes
-
AWS: AZ, Billing_Entity, Cache_Engine, Database_Engine, Deployment_Option, Instance_Type, Instance_Type_Family, Legal_Entity_Name, Linked_Account, Operating_System, Operation, Platform, Purchase_Type, Record_Type, Region. Reservation_ID, Tenancy, Usage_Type, Usage_Type_Group, Savings_Plan_Type, Savings_Plan_ARN
-
Azure: ResourceGroupName, ResourceType, ResourceID, ResourceLocation, Location, MeterCategory, MeterSubcategory, Meter, ServiceTier, BillingPeriod, PricingModel, ChargeType, PublisherType. Frequency, ResourceGUID, Account
-
-
Tags
-
AWS: Name, Owner, App, Module
-
Azure: Owner
-
-
-
Any or All
-
Other Options
Matching Conditions
The following conditions can be set to display data that is greater or less than the input value (either as a dollar amount or percentage).
-
AWS: Any Group Current Cost. Any Group Comparison Cost, Any Group Delta, Any Group Delta %
-
Azure: Any Group Current Cost
-
Options: ≤ ≥ < > =
Report Filters
When creating a report filter, you select a data source and the entities to include or exclude, by tag or by attribute.
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