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The following Flexera Cloud Management Policies have been depreciated and are no longer being updated.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Instance Utilization using RightLink Inefficient Instance Utilization using RightLink Add Tags Schedule Instances Superseded Instance Remediation Terminate Instances with End Date Discover Old Snapshots Unattached Volumes Operational AWS Cloud Credentials Rotation No Recent Snapshots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

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