Users are now able to see the adjusted and unadjusted costs (raw costs) in Cloud Cost Optimization reports. This new feature is enabled for users who need the cost-transparency to see adjusted and unadjusted costs into their cloud costs using the new role: View bill adjustments. We have added the View bill adjustments role to allow Cloud Cost Optimization administrators to grant users in their organization the permission to view the Adjustment Program page and the Bill Adjustments dimensions in the dashboards and tabular views. NOTE: The ability to view adjusted and unadjusted costs is also available to users with the Manage organization and Manage bill adjustments roles. For more information about viewing bill data adjustments, see Bill Data Adjustments in the Flexera One Help. For more information about Flexera One roles, see Flexera One Roles in the Flexera One Help. ... View more

Flexera continues to improve support for advanced cost allocation use cases with Rule-based Dimensions.  In the latest update, Rule-based dimensions now support billing center assignments to recommendations to allow cost center owners to see total potential savings on their billing centers. These recommendations can match based on the vendor_account or resource_group field. For details about using rule-based dimensions, see Rule-based Dimensions in the Flexera One Help. ... View more

Microsoft recently announced Azure Savings Plans meant to allow easier purchasing and commitment to discount pricing for users with consistent Azure compute resource usage. To help Flexera users take advantage of the new Azure Savings Plan model, we have added relevant recommendations in Cloud Cost Optimization. These recommendations allow our Cloud Cost Optimization users to see the savings they can achieve on their Azure spend, in one aggregated view, along with the other savings opportunities such as Azure RI, Unused Volumes, Idle Instances, and many more. You can find the policy for Azure Savings Plan Recommendations in our Automation Catalog or in our GitHub repository: To find this policy in our Automation Catalog in Flexera One, click Automation Catalog and, on the Automation Catalog page, search for Azure Savings Plan Recommendations. To find this policy in our GitHub repository, use your web browser to navigate to https://github.com/flexera-public/policy_templates/tree/master/cost/azure/savings_plan/recommendations. For more information about viewing your organization’s Total Potential Savings from recommendations, see Viewing Potential Savings in Flexera One Help. For more information about the Azure Savings Plan, see Microsoft’s learning page on that topic:What is Azure savings plans for compute?  ... View more

We've released two additional API routes for configuring rule-based dimensions: allowing edits to a single rule-based dimension (RBD), or even a single rules list. Previously, with only one API route to read/write the entire configuration covering all RBDs, any change involved uploading the entire configuration of every RBD in the org. With these new API routes, it will be easier to write a policy that can update a single RBD, or even just one month's rule list for an RBD. It no longer has to touch the config of any other RBD. For instance, a policy might want to populate an RBD to simulate an account tag. The policy would scrape a tag's value on all the accounts across multiple vendors, and use that mapping to generate a list of rules to populate one RBD. The policy could use the new API to write this rules list for the current month, without having to touch any other month or be concerned with any other RBD.  The API docs are updated here: https://reference.rightscale.com/bill_analysis/ Here's a snippet from the "Rule-Based Dimensions API" section:  API The main API route, /orgs/{org}/settings/rule_based_dimensions , lets you read/write the entire rule-based dimensions JSON configuration for the org. There are also two other API routes that let you work with a subset of the config – a single rule-based dimension, or a single rules list: /orgs/{org}/settings/rule_based_dimensions/{id} /orgs/{org}/settings/rule_based_dimensions/{id}/rules/{effective_at} And the two new routes have documentation for all their actions. Actions on a single RBD:  Actions on a single rules list: ... View more

Understanding your spend recommendations is paramount to optimizing your cloud spend and usage.  With the latest update to the Flexera One Cost Optimization Total Potential Savings you can now see where the biggest savings opportunities are on a single page.  Additionally, more filtering capabilities are available to quickly find the recommendations to optimize your cloud cost and usage. The following changes have been made to the Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud Overview page The page has been renamed to Optimization Recommendations are now categorized by a policy set.  A policy set is a way Flexera categorizes similar policies across multiple providers.  For example, the Unused Volumes policy set is a collection of all the Unused Volumes for AWS, Azure, Google, and others.  A new chart to show Rate Reduction recommendations that are by cloud and by policy set: Reserved Instance and Savings Plan A new Chart to show Usage Reduction recommendations by cloud and policy set: Unused Volumes, Unused Instances, Unused Database Services, Unused IP Addresses, Old Snapshots Read more about spend recommendations in the Total Potential Savings section of the Flexera One Help. ... View more

Flexera would like to announce an update to the Flexera One Automation pages. The following pages have been updated with a new look and experience. Automation Catalog Automation Applied Polices Automation Incidents Automation Templates As well as a new look and feel following Flexera One modern UX patterns, the page has moved under a modern UI framework (React) to ensure security compliance is adhered to. With the move to React, we are leveraging modern UI framework benefits: Ensuring security compliance with Web standards and the latest browsers Improved UX consistency Quality coverage increased Improved validation and user success/error messaging to support customer interactions Big step forward in further integrating it as part of Flexera One alongside other capabilities Moving the codebase into the modern integration of Flexera There are also plans to update the Automation Credentials in the Fall of 2022.  We expect to be complete with the Automation Update by Dec 31st 2022. ... View more

Flexera has released an update to the Automation and Cloud Cost Optimization solution areas to allow customers to create custom recommendations that populate with Total Potential Savings and recommendation details. For example, a user may want to customize an existing Flexera policy or create a new policy from scratch to meet their business needs. The user can use the new policy template attributes to inform the recommendation engine to ingest their new policy incident detail. The recommendation engine will show the new policy's total potential savings and recommendation details. Read more about this update in the Flexera Automation Documentation  ... View more

The following Flexera Cloud Management Policies have been depreciated and are no longer being updated.  The policies can still be used in the Flexera NAM environment.  They can also be modified as custom versions managed by customers.   For a complete list of the Flexera Policies or to access the policy templates for the deprecated policies please visit our GitHub repository.  List of deprecated Policies Compliance Disallowed Cloud Images Untagged Resources Unapproved Instance Types Cost Downsize Instances Running Instance Count Anomaly Inefficient Instance Utilization using RightLink Inefficient Instance Utilization using RightLink Add Tags Schedule Instances Superseded Instance Remediation Terminate Instances with End Date Discover Old Snapshots Unattached Volumes Operational AWS Cloud Credentials Rotation No Recent Snapshots Stranded Servers VMWare Instance Tag Sync Security Security Group with High Open Ports Security Groups with ICMP Enabled Security Group Rules without Description Security Group Rules with ports open to the world ... View more

In an effort to improve the integration with Flexera One and cloud providers, the below Policies have been enhanced with a new authentication method.  The listed Policies now require a new Flexera oAuth2 Credential for connecting with Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization. When Applying the Policies you will see a prompt to select the Flexera Automation Credential (see example below).  Select the Credential created as defined in the Provider Specific Credentials for Flexera. Example of Flexera One Credential Selection   This change only impacts the Policies of the Flexera One NAM instance (app.flexera.com).  Policies of Flexera One EU instance (app.flexera.eu) already include this enhancement and are not impacted. AWS Delete Unused Classic Load Balancers AWS Expiring Reserved Instances AWS GP3 Upgradeable Volumes AWS Idle Compute Instances AWS Old Snapshots AWS Reserved Instances Utilization AWS Unused IP Addresses AWS Unused RDS Instance AWS Unused Volumes Azure Expiring Reserved Instances Azure Idle Compute Instances Azure Old Snapshots Azure Sync Tags with Optima Azure Unused IP Addresses Azure Unused SQL Databases Azure Unused Volumes Billing Center Access Report Billing Center Cost Anomalies Budget Alerts Budget Alerts by Cloud Account Cheaper Regions Cloud Spend Forecast - Moving Average Flexera IAM Explicit User Roles Low Account Usage Low Service Usage Monthly Actual v. Budgeted Spend Report New Service Usage Reserved Instance Report by Billing Center Scheduled Report Superseded Instances ... View more

As we continue to improve our recent Spend Recommendations feature, we have added support for Azure Resource Groups. In this update, Recommendations are assigned to Billing Centers that are allocated to Azure Resource Groups. This allows the Cost Center owner to view Recommendations specific to the business needs to take the necessary action for savings optimization. For additional information refer to the following topics in the Flexera One Help: Analyzing Cloud Costs in Billing Centers Viewing Potential Savings ... View more

We are pleased to announce that the Cloud Cost Optimization Reserved Instances page now supports all AWS Services which support Reserved Instances. The update allows users to see the AWS Service, as well as other important details such as Utilization, Expiration date, Instance Type, Platform, and more. List of Services included: EC2 Compute RDS ElasticCache ElasticSearch Redshift   For related documentation, refer to Amazon Web Services Reserved Instances in the Flexera One Help.  ... View more

Flexera One administrators can now designate non-administrators to manage the Cloud Billing Centers.  There are two new roles now available to allow individuals to manage the Billing Centers.  These roles provide management capabilities at the  Flexera One Organization level of  Billing Centers and individual Billing Centers.   Key features Manage Billing Center Allocation Rules Create sub Billing Centers Manage Billing Center permissions Manage Billing Centers Full access to configure Billing Centers and management of user access to Billing Centers. Full read access except to Bill Adjustments and registration of billing data. Billing Center Admin Full access to configure and management of individual Billing Centers.    Refernces: Flexera One User Roles  Analyzing Cloud Costs in Billing Centers Analyzing Cloud Costs in Billing Centers  ... View more