We are delighted to share with you the recent updates to Cost Insight around cloud cost analysis, reporting and cost savings recommendations. VMware Cost Insight enables granular visibility into public and private cloud costs, so IT leaders can map investments to strategic IT priorities while optimizing costs across AWS, Azure and VMware environments. To learn more, please visit the Cost Insight webpage.
Historical cost analysis:
We’ve received feedback from customers that they would like additional insight into their cloud costs, specifically historical cost analysis beyond month-to-date spend. We are now providing this capability under ‘Analyze Expense’. As shown below, you can now see the expense trend for the last 3 months along with a projected expense for this month, shown in red. This can be adjusted to visualize last month, or current month spend. You can extend the analysis across different groups such as cloud accounts, regions, service types, instances, etc.
This analysis can be easily shared with key stakeholders via reports or exported into spreadsheets or a PNG file for collaboration purposes or further analysis. ‘Save As Report’ will pop up the report scheduler (shown below). Here you can schedule the report frequency and its recipients. This will be helpful when setting up operations process flows such as sharing with finance teams.
Savings recommendations
A major challenge for IT teams is how to run their infrastructure at an optimal level and keep expenses to a minimum. Cost Insight now provides additional recommendations to include right sizing opportunities from over-provisioned VMs. The Savings Opportunities section has the summary of the savings recommendations in both currency and objects. A detailed table view shows the instances, their type, monthly savings potential and recommended action for that instance. Clicking on each of the savings recommendation will pop up a box that has additional information on this recommendation.
These recommendations are triggered when thresholds based on industry benchmarks are exceeded. These thresholds can also be customized for your environment based on your preferences or requirements. The following figure shows the cost drivers for AWS instances and their configurable thresholds. This functionality is now accessible straight from the Savings Opportunities window.
Expense spike alerts
Cost Insight now alerts you when your cloud expenses grow more quickly than expected. You can monitor and control your public cloud costs on a daily basis by assigning a daily expense growth limit based on a percentage increase over the previous day’s. Alerts can be sent automatically to your inbox when that growth limit is exceeded.
To check out these new features and try Cost Insight for free for a limited period, please request access here.
