Perspectives – “lenses” by which you can view your cloud infrastructure – have given CloudHealth customers the ability create reporting aligned with their business for several years. These views are based on groups of assets determined by their tags or metadata, and allow firms to more accurately track their cloud usage and spend by sorting criteria relevant to their business. As more and more migrations to the public cloud take place, cloud infrastructure gets more complex and your costs are in danger of running out of control.
CloudHealth Perspectives have enabled key FinOps practices for businesses, giving more control and organization over dynamically changing infrastructure, creating accountability within consumption-based pricing models, and emphasizing the importance of a comprehensive tagging strategy. Perspectives give you the ability to apply organization principles that are aligned with and customizable to your business, enabling you to effectively show and charge back the correct internal teams based on their actual consumption.
For those of you who are new to Perspectives, we think the below example will help illustrate the power of Perspectives in organizing and controlling your cloud environments. We also recommend checking out our guide on setting up your own Perspectives. And for those of you who are more experienced creating and using Perspectives, we’re excited to share some enhancements that will help you build them more efficiently.
Perspectives: The Playing Card Analogy
Suppose you have a full deck of cards, which you can organize in different ways. You can group the cards by value or suit, or you can define more creative rules. For example, in a game of poker, the suit and value of a card can give you a strong hand with three of a kind or a flush. However, putting together a full house, straight, or royal flush will more often result in a win and a higher stack of chips.
When it comes to your cloud environment, you can think in a similar way when organizing your assets. Like the characteristics of cards in a deck, your assets have metadata that can define how they are organized. Perspectives offer you the ability to group your resources in whichever ways you decide are most relevant to your business. Simple tracking based on asset type is a good start to gaining control of your environment but designing Perspectives that align with your business will allow you to achieve enhanced visibility and realize more efficient uses of your cloud budget.
What if you decide to use a filter that doesn’t include all the cards in the deck? For example, grouping even and odd numbered cards together would conspicuously leave out the Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces. In this case, only 70% of the cards in the deck have been allocated to a group based on your criteria. Perspectives also allow you to group together only the assets you are most interested in tracking. This application can also help if you are trying to identify untagged resources, or simply trying to understand assets that are not allocated to your Perspective.
Updates for Building Better Perspectives
Given the many benefits of Perspectives in helping business govern their cloud environments, CloudHealth is constantly evaluating and implementing ways to make them better. Below are a few recent changes that will make Perspectives easier to build, use, and optimize:
- Updated key AWS asset type labels
- When viewing Perspectives, key AWS asset type labels and tooltips have been updated to improve clarity and usability.
- With this enhancement, labels have been shortened so assets can be selected more easily to include in your Perspectives.
- Additionally, the AWS Taggable and AWS Associated Asset type label is more concise to improve comprehension and avoid truncation when selected from dropdowns.
- See Perspective rules from the Discover Tab
- In the Discover tab, you can simply click on the View icon to see all the group’s rules. Previously, this was only accessible by navigating to the Groups tab.
- This new functionality allows users to not only see their rules more easily, but also do so for multiple Perspectives at once to compare rules across groups.
- Expedited Perspective Building Experience
- We’ve been focusing on making improvements that will help you build and edit Perspectives more quickly as you govern your environment.
- First, progress messages that appear when adding or changing groups within a Perspective will now be more consistent and accurate, giving you the clarity you need as you work.
- Second, minor acknowledgments have been removed so that the Perspective building experience can be further expedited.
- Third, in the Discover tab, the default option for discovery will now be Categorize, aligning with the primary use case for this function.
Perspectives are just one way that CloudHealth helps you build a successful Cloud Financial Management practice. To learn more on how to continue building your practice, check out our white paper.
