New Experience, New Chapter; Still Breaking FinOps Barriers

As a part of FinOps X in San Diego, CloudHealth has announced the biggest investment into the platform since its inception. The new CloudHealth experience has been purposely designed with the modern FinOps practitioner in mind and is built to address the new challenges and concerns that are a part of the continuously evolving FinOps landscape. With groundbreaking new AI-powered functionality like Intelligent Assist and Smart Summary, the new experience is designed to target those key customer struggles and promote FinOps as a cultural practice throughout the organization.

Since 2012, CloudHealth has been on the forefront of the cloud financial management, or FinOps, space. As we’ve witnessed over the past 13 years, there has been a boom in cloud based infrastructure, software, resources, and most recently AI. Providing visibility into cloud usage and cost, generating optimization recommendations, and enabling governance are now table stakes as FinOps teams are asked to be more responsible for managing exceedingly complex environments, providing oversight over new scopes of IT spend, and working with an expanding set of stakeholders. 

The new CloudHealth experience is designed to help FinOps teams and extended stakeholders understand where they need to devote their attention and simplify the management of complex environments. It is an evolution of CloudHealth’s existing ability to ingest data at scale from myriad sources, integrate with third-party tools that are necessary for operations, export granular reporting, and offer flexible access and permissions to mirror your organization. The enhancements of the new CloudHealth experience enable paths to more easily accomplish FinOps-driven outcomes and accelerate your business transformation.

Intelligent Assist

One of the most significant additions to the new CloudHealth experience is Intelligent Assist, a generative AI FinOps co-pilot embedded in the platform that helps users take full advantage of CloudHealth capabilities with product guidance, complex report generation capabilities, actionable recommendations, and more. Intelligent Assist is a large language model-enabled chatbot that allows users to gain insights about their clouds and services through natural language, such as granular custom reports or recommendations specific to their cloud usage. It makes tasks simpler for experienced users while helping to break down barriers to entry for business-oriented personas who are interested in exploring their cloud cost and usage. By enabling technical and non-technical users alike, Intelligent Assist is a crucial feature in enhancing collaboration across the FinOps team and organization, making data accessible to all decision-makers and ensuring everyone has access to and is using the same data in their day-to-day operations.

Intelligent Assist offers a more efficient workflow for FinOps practitioners, cloud operators, or other technical users to quickly dive into cloud cost and usage data. They can use Intelligent Assist to query specific types of resources, generate reports on the fly, or understand changes occurring across multi-cloud environments. Intelligent Assist is also incorporated in Smart Summary, which keeps users informed on specific, resource-level changes that may be driving cost and usage, by providing recommended actions based on FinOps best practices. 

Smart Summary

With the scale of the public cloud, and especially when multiple public clouds are in use, it is impossible to stay on top of the daily changes in your environment that could be driving cloud costs. Smart Summary provides a concise summary of what is driving your cloud spend, how and why it changes over time, and relevant Generative AI-assisted suggestions to take action. Highlighted by its ability to track changes at a per-resource level, and with reasoning as to why changes have occurred and what recommendations to take for next steps, Smart Summary enables users to be able to quickly identify, understand, and communicate what is happening with their spend. 

Asset Explorer

Asset level visibility isn’t just being able to see what an asset costs or what region it is running in, but visualizing additional resources that asset is connected to, cataloging the tags and metadata associated with the asset, and understanding how the asset is being used. The Asset Explorer provides the FinOps Practitioner with on-demand visibility to asset metadata and the relationships between assets. Users can run simple queries to find specific tagged assets, unattached disks or volumes, aged snapshots, or idle VMs. The Asset Explorer is an evolution of the Asset report, providing a visual explorer of your assets and their relationships that includes a built-in query engine to help you author queries for specific types of assets and save them for future use. Assets are also integrated with Intelligent Assist for searches throughnatural language. These instant policy-like asset requests enable a FinOps practice to take action sooner and maintain granular visibility over their multi-cloud environment. 

Optimization & Realized Savings Dashboards

Cloud optimization is a wide-ranging and continuous task, but vital to demonstrating the value and impact of the FinOps practice. It takes a large amount of effort to identify, analyze, and execute optimization activities, but doing so can lead to a much more efficient cloud operation that reduces waste and maximizes investments. The new CloudHealth experience introduces the Optimization Dashboard and Realized Savings Dashboards to equip FinOps teams with the data and reporting required to making efficient and impactful optimization decisions and show that impact to the broader business. 

The Optimization Dashboard provides a single, customizable pane that brings together all available commitment discount recommendations, rightsizing opportunities, anomalous spending, and potential savings across your clouds and services. The intent of the Optimization Dashboard is to help users determine the best way to maximize their time devoted to optimization activities, highlighting where they can immediately make the biggest impact. While users may have previously felt paralyzed by the sheer number of recommendations presented to them, the new Optimization dashboard aims to present the most impactful actions that can be taken and enhance continuous multi-cloud optimization activities.

Despite the time and investment FinOps teams devote to optimizing multi-cloud environments, they often have trouble answering the question: “How can I tell how much I’ve saved while using CloudHealth?” The Realized Savings Dashboard gives FinOps teams the ability to track cost savings and showcase how the organization is being fiscally responsible. With the dashboard, customers can track their aggregated savings from multiple sources in one place. Default widgets on this customizable dashboard include commitment coverage, commitment utilization, unit cost, and effective savings rate. With the Realized Savings dashboard, CloudHealth arms FinOps practitioners with the data points needed to demonstrate their effectiveness and showcase the results of their practice to the larger business.

Custom Reports

Creating and manipulating reports using data at public cloud scale remains a challenge even for users with a technical background. Reports in the new CloudHealth experience have been unified to give users a simplified way to build and access the reports they need and the level of customization required for their business needs.. 

As part of the new CloudHealth experience, users have access to a library of out of the box reports; custom reports created using SQL, through the new CloudHealth reporting user interface, or through natural language with Intelligent Assist; and custom reporting that can be shared across specified sub-organizations, teams, or customer tenants.

Custom reports can be made through the UI or with Intelligent Assist, removing technical barriers and learning curves so that FinOps stakeholders of all experience levels can access the data that is most impactful to their business. Reporting includes a built-in SQL IDE and a new calculated column feature, enabling users to build complex reports that dive deep into the heart of cloud spend in exciting and unique ways.

Custom Widgets and Dashboards

​​With the many personas involved in the FinOps practice, it is important that anyone accessing CloudHealth can tailor the experience to meet their needs and keep the most pertinent information at their fingertips. With new Custom Dashboards and Widgets, customers can create completely customized dashboards and embed multiple user-created reports (via widgets) into a single dashboard. In the new CloudHealth experience, if it can be put into a report, it can be put into a custom dashboard. 

Additional widgets are available out of the box that highlight optimization opportunities, commitment summaries, anomalies, wasted spend or resources, and more. Of course, dashboard elements can also be resized and moved based on a user’s preference. Custom Dashboards give users unprecedented flexibility to create an experience tailored specifically to their daily roles and priorities.

Experience CloudHealth like never before 

Take a tour of the new CloudHealth experience to see how it enables easier paths to FinOps-driven outcomes for your business. Reach out to our team today.