Dashboard

Private clouds afford you to directly access to monitoring the Compute, network, and storage elements. But Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) models present unique challenges. With these models, you lose direct control of – and visibility over – the assets comprising the services.

The goal of these reports is to provide organization with actionable business intelligence (BI) to make stronger business decisions and learn from ongoing data collection. One of the key aspects of a real-time dashboard is the ability to automatically refresh the data behind visualizations and dashboards.

With the latest data set available, IT Administrators have a powerful tool to track daily and hourly resource utilization. This allows them to react in a proactive way rather than being reactive. Departmental heads leverage this Dashboard to approve additional resources and operate and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale.

On each of these dashboards, visualization provides information to users in a simple and concise manner. Monitoring, tracking, and recognizing potential problems can all be accomplished with the information provided by these dashboards.

The live dashboard available with this package is broadly segmented as:

1. AWS Cloud Resources
2. AWS Reserved Instances

• Provides details on your Reserved Instances. In case of AWS, the widget will display recommendation on purchase/sell of an instance based on your last 30 days usage. In case of Azure, the widget will display recommendation on purchase/cancel of an instance based on your last 30 days usage.
  • The widget generates your RI recommendation using:
    • Identifies your On-Demand instance usage during a specific time period
    • Collects your usage into categories that are eligible for an RI
    • Simulates every combination of RIs in each category of usage
    • Identifies the best number of each type of RI to purchase to maximize your estimated savings
    • Identifies the un-utilized RIs and provides recommendations to sell

      For Example: If you have purchased 2 quantities of RI and used only one, then the system recommends you to sell the un-utilized quantity, to save money.

      For an instance, you have purchased one quantity of RI for a period of 3 years (depends on ISV) and you are billed monthly based on your usage. However, you feel like your usage is not as expected, so to avoid the charges for un-utilized RI the system recommends you to sell.

      How the sell recommendation unfolds:
      For 28 days (in a month) it is considered as 672 hours (28 number of days*24 number of hours). The minimum threshold limit is considered as 30% of number of hours (which is 201.6 hours). So, if your usage is less than the threshold limit, the system recommends to sell the remaining number of quantities.

      Note: Here the quantities are measured in number of hours based on number of days in a calendar month.

  • Reserved instances can offer significant savings over pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing
  • Better budgeting and forecasting with upfront payment for one-year or three-year terms
  • A RI is a reservation of resources and capacity, for either one or three years, for a particular Availability Zone within a region. Unlike on-demand, when you purchase a reservation, you commit to paying for all of the hours of the 1- or 3-year term; in exchange, the hourly rate is lowered significantly.

  • All Reserved Instances provide you with a discount compared to On-Demand pricing. With Reserved Instances, you pay for the entire term regardless of actual use. You can choose to pay for your Reserved Instance upfront, partially upfront, or monthly, depending on the payment option specified for the Reserved Instance. When Reserved Instances expire, you are charged On-Demand rates for instance usage.

• Over-provisioned databases (AWS RDS) based on their CPU Utilization
• Database either oversized or not utilized for more than 15 days. Reducing the size of your database instance or terminating unused databases will reduce your cloud cost.
• Consider revising the rules for better security, because Security Groups with ports opened other than 80 & 433 to the public Internet.
• If the IPs that are not attached to any network interfaces should be released to reduce cost.
• Delete all your redundant snapshots that have not been deleted for more than 30, 60 & 90 days. Deleting all such snapshots will reduce your cloud storage cost.
• Delete images that are unused beyond 30, 60 & 90 days. Deleting all such images will reduce your cloud storage cost.
• Remove Volumes that are unattached to any Instance allows you to lower your cloud storage cost.
• The Elastic Load Balancer may have less than 2 Instances attached to them. The platform recommends you to consider registering instances to utilize the ELB or delete it to manage cloud spend.
• If the Average CPU Utilization is less than 60% and maximum is 80% for last 30 days, these instances are considered as “Underutilized”. It is recommended to delete such instances to reduce cost.
• The instances that are in Stopped state are still chargeable. Hence it is recommended to terminate such instances (if not required) to reduce cost.

To view your recommendation, do the following:

1. On the Dashboard menu, click IaaS Dashboard. The IaaS Dashboard page is displayed.
2. Click the Recommendation icon. The system will load all the recommendation based on selected provider and region.
3. Click any specific recommendations, to view and take necessary actions.
4. You can also export your recommendation in .csv format. Click the CSV icon to export.

The Executive Dashboard tracks key cloud vital trends such as costs and resources in order to help DevOps, IT Managers, CIOs, CTOs, and Finance departments oversee all of cloud costs centrally and to act upon those facts.

Filter Criteria:

The default view out of the box displays the data for the current Month-to-date (MTD)- which is a period starting at the beginning of the current month and ending at the current date. You may however use the Calendar Date Picker to view the data for a specific date range or click on the 'Year to Date' option to view the data from the beginning of the current year and ending at the current date.

The Dashboard, also loads by default, the data for all vendors or Cloud Service Providers consumed by your organization. You may however choose to select one specific provider from the list of providers to view the graphical reports.

Remember to click 'Apply' every time you change the default selections to refresh the page, otherwise the old data is displayed in all the widgets of this page.

Note:

• Month and Year correspond to the Gregorian Calendar with the year starting with January and the month starting from the first.
• A maximum of 92 days can be selected at a time.
• It is not possible to select a future date.

How often the data is updated?

This page gets updated twice in a day at a specific time. To see the last time the dashboard was updated, refer to the text “Last Updated On” at the top right corner of page.

Updating once a day means that the data displayed on this page is not exactly real time. So do not expect to see a Virtual Machine that you have spun up at 10:00 AM to be visible here immediately. You can expect a data latency of a day or two, as it takes a while for the Cloud Service Provider to record the usage and for the internal Data Warehouse to process the same.

Customizable:

Widgets can be moved to other locations within a page.

The top right corner of each widget has an arrow that allows you to resize the widget.

Each widget is loaded with a specific chart type that can display the data in an optimal manner. However, you can choose to view the data using another Chart type.

Note: Currently for this phase it is not possible to save the edits to the page.

Dashboard Access:

The Dashboard can be viewed only by Administrators and the End Users. However, it can be viewed by other users, provided they have the valid privileges.

Dashboard Rules:

All costs displayed in this dashboard are excluding taxes (if any).

The costing data is rounded up to two decimals in all graphical reports using the Rounding Logic. This means that it is possible to notice a small difference between the total costs displayed at the page and the 'Cost by Products' or 'Cost by Providers' due to rounding.

The exception to the rule of displaying the data with two decimals is when the data is displayed for a 'Pie' Chart. Each slice of the pie displays the percentage value with only one decimal and slices with very small percentage values are not visible. This means there may be cases when the total of all slices in a pie chart may not add up to 100% due to a rounding difference.

All the cost related data are displayed in your store currency. Thus, it is possible that the usage data displayed may differ slightly from actual usage data based on the exchange rate used for calculation.

Rules for Graphical display:

If there are more than 31 data points that need to be displayed for a widget, the default loading will be the Tabular report. You may use the pagination to view the complete data or use the 'Print Screen' option to print the same. You can download the data that is available in the widget in .csv format.

The costing data represented for the current Month to date or for the current period should be considered as estimates.

Please note that the graphical reports are not bills, only the monthly invoice that you receive contains your actual charges. For the current billing period (monthly), the reports approximates the cost of your organization's cloud usage to day and will change as you continue to consume resources.

Sometimes in a PIE chart, we combine all the values smaller than X% in a single “Other” slice.

Also, while viewing the data as a pie chart, it is possible that you notice a difference between the number of slices and the number of legends (with more legends than the slices). This happens because the slices with an insignificant percentage do not appear as a slice on the graph but is still represented by a legend. To view this data more accurately, it is recommended that you use switch to a Tabular report.

Each widgets will display the labels (up to a specific number of characters based on the space available for display) and the user can view the entire label by hovering on the product/provider name.

When listing the details (products/providers etc) in the drop-down filters, you can type the first few characters and automatically the text that contains the first few characters will be displayed in the drop-down list.

Click here to know more about Executive Dashboard.

To get the most out of your spending data, the Cost Analytic Dashboard allows you to drill deeper into the costs based on different parameters and optimize the size of your cloud deployments.

The filter criteria, Dashboard access, Dashboard Rules, frequency of updates is similar to the Executive Dashboard.

The costing data displayed here is excluding the taxes.

Click here to know more about Cost Analytic.

Tag-based cost allocation involves analyzing and associating the costs with specific categories (e.g. department, projects) to provide cost visibility allowing asset management, security, and compliance tracking. Once a resource is tagged either in the providers' console or from the Cloud Management Platform, the cost associated with this resource is reported by this dashboard page. This enables you to organize your resources in a way that is independent of the deployment relationships.

• Only resources that are tagged are considered. Resources that are not Tagged are excluded.
• The Server metadata or Resource metadata information captured using the providers' tagging functionality is also excluded from this report
• All costs displayed in this dashboard are excluding taxes (if any).
• If there are multiple VMs with the same Tag and Values, then the values displayed are of cumulative usage. Hence the usage calculated based on the Tags may not match with the Account level usage.
• The filter criteria, Dashboard access, Dashboard Rules, frequency of updates is similar to the Executive Dashboard.

Click hereto know more about Tag Analytic.

An Azure EA can have multiple departments, each department can have multiple accounts and each account can have multiple subscriptions. Jamcracker Appliance - Cloud Control provides you a unique EA dashboard to analyze cost based on departments, account, and subscriptions.

1. The total cost of each Department is displayed as a new widget.
2. By Default Total Cost for the Top 5 Departments is displayed. If there are more than 5 Departments, the user can view the total cost for 10 Departments and also for ‘All’ Departments.
3. As a Department can have multiple accounts, the total cost per department would display the aggregated total cost of all accounts associated to that Department.

1. The total cost of each Account is displayed as a new widget.
2. By Default the total Cost for the Top 5 Accounts. If there are more than 5 Accounts, the user can view the total cost for 10 Accounts and also for All Accounts.
3. As an Account can have multiple subscriptions, the total cost per Account would display the aggregated total cost of ‘All’ subscriptions associated to that Account.

1. The Total cost of each subscription is displayed as a new widget.
2. By Default display the Total Cost for the Top 5 Subscriptions. If there are more than 5 Subscriptions, the user can view the total cost for 10 Subscriptions and also for ‘All’ Subscriptions.