Following our release of the Total Potential Savings in March we are excited to include Google Cloud Platform recommendations.  The Total Potential Savings now includes AWS, Azure and Google clouds. The release includes 5 new recommendations that calculated the total potential savings for Rate and Usage Recommendations and are allocated to your Flexera One Billing Centers.   The new recommendations are published in the Flexera One Automation Catalog and are ready for use now.   Rate Reduction Recommendation Google Committed Use Discount Recommender Usage Reduction Recommendations  Google Idle Persistent Disk Recommender Google Cloud SQL Idle Instance Recommender Google Idle IP Address Recommender Google Idle VM Recommender Documentation: https://docs.flexera.com/flexera/EN/Optima/ViewPotentialSavings.htm ... View more

Flexera is pleased to announce that they have released many new Automation policies to provide insights to cloud spend and usage.   Please find the full list of new policies in the Release Notes ... View more

We are excited to announce we have released a new feature to identify significant changes in cloud spend.  Use the Cost Anomaly Detection feature to track down the anomalous spend and take the necessary action to keep your costs in control.   Key Feature Multi-Cloud - supports all the cloud data ingested by Flexera Identify spikes in the upper and lower bounds of spend Uses machine learning to understand your cloud spend patterns Documentation: https://docs.flexera.com/flexera/EN/Optima/CostAnomaly.htm ... View more

Flexera is pleased to announce an enhancement to the Cloud Cost Optimization Recommendations.  The changes provide a new view of your organization's Total Potential Savings from recommendations, and the ability to dig into the recommendations and share them with your stakeholders. The update replaces the existing Billing Center Recommendations with a new page that includes greater customization and depth.   The update includes the following changes A Cloud Overview page is added to the Cloud menu on the Flexera One navigation The Cloud Overview page includes the Total Spend and Total Potential Savings from discovered Recommendations.  Ability to drill into and filter the recommendations by billing center, recommendation name, savings, cloud, service, and other attributes.  Recommendations leverage our powerful Automation capability and Policy Templates allowing Flexera to quickly add and customize recommendations Coverage for AWS and Azure clouds. Google Compute to follow shortly after.  Ability to add more clouds in future updates.   Future versions to allow customers to create their own recommendations to contribute to the Total Potential Savings  The Billing Center Recommendations tab is removed   The enhancement includes two categories of recommendations: Rate Reduction – recommendations to reduce the cloud rate,  i.e., Reserved Instances, Committed Used Discounts, and Savings Plans  Usage Reduction – recommendations to reduce cloud usage, i.e., Unused Volumes, Instances and databases, IP Addresses, and Old Snapshots Please see the documentation for more details.  Below are some examples of the changes described above.   Billing Centers without Recommendations Tab   Cloud Overview Page showing Total Potential Savings for Rate and Usage Reduction   ... View more

Flexera One Customer Action - Safelist Update in EU In order to support the proper functioning of Flexera One, we ask that Flexera One EU customers update URL and endpoints from their environments to the trusted sites of the browsers they are using with Flexera One. An engineering update to the Automation Credentials endpoints will occur on March 30th, at 1pm UTC time zone. Please ensure your IT administrators are aware and have the following safe listed for this timeline. REQUIRED: This is required for all EU users. The base endpoint for Credentials in the Automation section should include the revised endpoints listed below. Automation/Credentials EU users now require: add front.credentials-eu.flexeraeng.com Please remove eu-central-1.credentials-eu.flexeraeng.com as it is no longer needed. This is also documented on Flexera One Safelist page here: https://docs.flexera.com/flexera/EN/Common/safelist.htm ... View more

Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization continues to add more granular roles to provide the permissions stakeholders need for their cost management needs.  The addition of the new View Reserved Instances role allows users to view the Reserved Instances page.   Along with this change, on April 11, 2022, the View Cloud Cost role is removed from allowing access to the Reserved Instances page. Users that need access to the Reserved Instances page will now need View Reserved Instances. Flexera One User Roles ... View more

Flexera One Automation is a powerful capability that allows integration with public and internal APIs for recommendations, governance, and reporting. In some cases, our Automation system needs to access systems that restrict access by IP address, such as firewalls or SaaS (software as a service) solutions with high-security needs. Flexera provides the CIDR IP ranges used by our Automation capability so that external systems can be configured to allow our systems access to the necessary details using a trusted IP addresses range. You can read more in the Flexera One Documentation: Getting Started with Automation ... View more

Flexera is working on an update to the Cloud Cost Optimization Recommendations they would like to inform their customers about.  The update replaces the existing Billing Center Recommendations with a new page that includes greater customization and depth.  This change is planned for mid to late March 2022 The update includes the following changes The Billing Center Recommendations tab is removed A Cloud Overview page is added to the Cloud menu on the Flexera One navigation The Cloud Overview page includes the Total Spend and Total Potential Savings from discovered Recommendations.  Ability to drill into and filter the recommendations by billing center, recommendation name, savings, cloud, service, and other attributes.  Recommendations leverage our powerful Automation capability and Policy Templates allowing Flexera to quickly add and customize recommendations Coverage for AWS and Azure clouds. Google Compute to follow shortly after.  Ability to add more clouds in future updates.   Future versions to allow customers to create their own recommendations to contribute to the Total Potential Savings  The enhancement includes two categories of recommendations: Rate Reduction – recommendations to reduce the cloud rate,  i.e., Reserved Instances, Committed Used Discounts and Savings Plans  Usage Reduction – recommendations to reduce cloud usage, i.e., Unused Volumes, Instances and databases, IP Addresses, and Old Snapshots Below are some examples of the changes described above.   Billing Centers without Recommendations Tab   Cloud Overview Page showing Total Potential Savings for Rate and Usage Reduction   ... View more

A new behind-the-scenes platform is being deployed by Flexera to process AWS cloud bills.  This change is planned for Feb 9th 2022 12:00-5:00pm PST.  No downtime is planned during this transition.   Some enhancements that you may notice: Billing data will be available hours sooner than previously Newer features such as Bill Monitoring are built on top of the new platform Daily granularity will match more closely to AWS Cost Explorer Some values will match more closely to the AWS cost report. Since Flexera is no longer normalizing these values, users will want to check their dashboards to make sure the values show as expected. The fields that may change are Usage Type, Instance Type, and Region.   See tables below for more details: legacy instance_type new instance_type dms.t2.micro t2.micro db.r5.12xl db.r5.12xlarge dms.t2.medium t2.medium dms.r4.2xlarge r4.2xlarge m4.xlarge m4.xlarge.elasticsearch db.m6g.4xl db.m6g.4xlarge c4.large c4.large.elasticsearch dms.t3.micro t3.micro db.r5.24xl db.r5.24xlarge m5.large m5.large.elasticsearch db.m4.10xl db.m4.10xlarge dms.t2.large t2.large db.r5.2xl db.r5.2xlarge r5.large r5.large.elasticsearch c5.xlarge c5.xlarge.elasticsearch db.m5.12xl db.m5.12xlarge dms.t2.small t2.small r5.xlarge r5.xlarge.elasticsearch db.m5.xl db.m5.xlarge db.m5.2xl db.m5.2xlarge   legacy usage_type new usage_type Requests-Tier2 USW1-Requests-Tier2 EU-AWS-In-Bytes USW2-EU-AWS-In-Bytes DataTransfer-In-Bytes USW1-DataTransfer-In-Bytes DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes USW1-DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes Requests-Tier2-HTTPS US-Requests-Tier2-HTTPS BoxUsage BoxUsage:m4.2xlarge ReadCapacityUnit-Hrs EU-ReadCapacityUnit-Hrs TimedStorage-ByteHrs USW1-TimedStorage-ByteHrs TimedStorage-ByteHrs USW2-TimedStorage-ByteHrs   legacy region new region EU (Ireland) Any US East (N. Virginia) Any Any EU (Ireland) Asia Pacific (Seoul) Any US West (Oregon) Any Any Canada (Central) Asia Pacific (Singapore) Any US West (N. California) Any Any US West (N. California) ... View more

Cloud Cost Optimization now allows cloud spend to be allocated using Azure Resource Group(s).  With this change Billing Center Owners can create allocation rules on one or more Azure Resource Groups to view and optimize their Azure spend by Azure subscriptions, tags, and resource groups.   Reference: Cost Allocation Rules for Azure Resource Groups ... View more

In Flexera One, the Cloud Cost Optimization users are now able to share a configured tabular view with other Cloud Cost Optimization users.  The update includes adding a share button to the tabular page.  When clicking the icon the current URL is copied to the clipboard.  Once you copied the URL you are able to paste the URL into other tools such as email or chat clients to send to other users.   How to use: Create a tabular view with the dimensions, date, usage, and filter parameters Click the share icon to place the generated URL into the clipboard Paste the generated URL into your email or chat clients to send to another user. Example of tabular view with the share icon         ... View more

Flexera is pleased to announce recently added roles for managing the cloud spend.  These new roles allow Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization stakeholders access to manage custom dimensions, rule-based dimensions, and bill adjustments. Role Name Role Description Manage custom dimensions Full access to manage custom tags in Cloud Cost Optimization. Manage rule-based dimensions Full access to manage rule-based dimensions in Cloud Cost Optimization. Manage bill adjustments Full access to manage bill adjustments in Cloud Cost Optimization.   References: Flexera One User Roles Access Management ... View more

Flexera One Automation allows you to create an AWS STS role across multiple AWS accounts with the same role name and permissions. How to create an AWS STS credential for two or more AWS accounts using the aws_account_number field is further explained in the following product documentation topics: Authorization  AWS STS Multi-Account Credential Usage  AWS STS Multi-Account Credential Usage Troubleshooting  This update improves the configuration and maintenance of  AWS STS Cross Account Roles to run Policies on many AWS accounts.   ... View more

New Policy Templates Google Recommendations - Exposes a number of recommendations to identify potential saving opportunities for Google Cloud Changes to Existing Policy Templates AWS Reserved Instance Recommendations - Include support for all Reserved Instance Types and Linked Account Scope.  A single policy can be applied to see all Reserved Instance Recommendations for each AWS account. AWS Savings Plan Recommendations - Includes support for Linked Account Scope to understand which AWS accounts to apply the savings plans Azure Reserved Instance Recommendations - Include support for all Reservation types to understand the full potential savings using reservations  Azure Unused Volumes - Improved scale for a large number of volumes found in the Azure tenant ... View more