Every organization wants to reduce cloud spend and gain control of their growing cloud environment, however, continuously monitoring for optimization opportunities can be a time-consuming task. CloudHealth can save you time and money with the Azure Health Check Pulse Report. An extremely popular report among executives and department leaders, the Health Check provides a 360-degree view of potential opportunities to improve optimization and governance across your Azure environment for the given month. The Health Check consists of seven key components that you can drill-down into for additional information or take action:
Immediate Savings
This Immediate Savings section identifies quick wins for eliminating waste in your environment. Specifically, it displays unattached Managed Disks that are no longer attached to a virtual machine and unused Virtual Network Gateways that are still incurring costs. These resources are no longer being used and therefore can be deleted.
Cloud Governance
The Cloud Governance section identifies the top assets that have been left untagged such as Resource Groups, Security Groups, and Virtual Machines (VMs). For example, you will be able to see if you have 20 untagged VMs in your cloud environment. Once you have that knowledge, you can then take action to fix the tags, or even terminate the VMs.
Operational Monthly Savings
Use the Operational Monthly Savings section to identify underutilized VMs and SQL Databases that can be rightsized in order to optimize your infrastructure and reduce costs. For example, when VMs have utilization of 35% or less for core performance metrics (CPU, memory, or disk), that often means they are underutilized. Rightsizing is a standard cloud management best practice for boosting efficiency.
Security Risk Exposures
CloudHealth leverages the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Azure Foundations Benchmark to validate your security posture. In this section of the Health Check, you can see potential security threats that are designated as critical or high risk. From here, you can drill-down into the Security Violation Report for additional details such as the affected resources and recommended remediation steps.
Reservation Management Monthly Savings
Purchasing Reserved Virtual Machine Instances is one of the best ways to optimize your cloud spend. The Reservation Management Monthly Savings section calculates potential savings based on a fully optimized purchase and based on your budget. The recommendation includes the amortized upfront price, the projected reservation rate, and the payback period. CloudHealth not only helps you plan these reservation purchases, but it also helps you effectively manage them throughout their lifecycle.
Burndown
If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA), CloudHealth helps you track the remaining balance against your original commitment. The Health Check displays your Cost Burndown Report, which shows the remaining balance by months and enrollments. You can use this report to verify how much money you have to spend on new reservations and other purchases.
Notices
The last component of the Health Check is the Notices section. Here you can see which of your Azure assets (and how many) are running on the Classic deployment model. You can then determine whether or not you need to migrate these assets to the Azure Resource Management (ARM) deployment model. Any additional account notices will also appear in this section.
