Insights
CloudZero observations of trends, recommendations for potential optimizations, and anomalies in your cloud cost
Insights provide recommendations that will help you save money or avoid costs by addressing the issues referenced in the insight. An insight may include observations of costs that are not inline with expectations, optimization recommendations, trend information, or potential issues that may be causing unnecessary and unexpected costs. The information for insights is collected through different methods, including information and recommendations from the cloud providers, billing and usage data, and human observations.
Each insight includes the following data:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | A short descriptive title for the insight. This field can only be modified for manual insights. |
| Description | A more in-depth description that provides information on what data and what conditions are checked for the insight. This field can only be modified for manual insights. |
| Source | The source of the insight. See the table below for the different sources. |
| Status | The status helps manage a workflow for addressing insights. See the table below for the possible status values and their descriptions. This field is usually updated by end users as they manage their insights. However, insights generated by the CloudZero platform or by the Trusted Advisor in AWS may be automatically updated as conditions change. |
| Effort Level | This field indicates how much effort - Low, Medium, or High - is required to address the insight. Often this field is left blank until a member of an organization sets it as part of an initial triage process. |
| Category | This field will indicate the type of insight. It may indicate that the insight is an Optimization that can be applied to services, an Observation of ways that costs of a particular service are out of line with normal expectations, a Trend of increasing costs or the detection of a Cost Anomaly indicating potential unwanted spend. |
| Cost Impact | This field indicates the current expectation of the potential savings by addressing the conditions of the insight. This value does not indicate a guaranteed amount of savings as different approaches to address the insight may result in different levels of savings or maybe not all issues and resources indicated in the insight can be addressed. See the section on Potential Savings and Cost Avoidance for more information. |
| Cost Avoidance | This field uses data from the insight to calculate how much savings were realized by addressing the insight. See the section on Potential Savings and Cost Avoidance for more information. |
| Link | The link will take you to the Explorer showing a window of spend that highlights the issues indicated in the insight. This link should be useful when digging deeper into the data to understand and address the issues. |
| Resources | Some insights and anomalies display a table of affected resources. |
| Comments | Users can add comments to an insight to help facilitate discussions on how best to address an insight. |
The fields for Status, Effort, and Comments enable you and your team to stay actively engaged with the insight and collaborate on addressing the issues.
Source Values
| Source | Description |
|---|---|
| Manual | These insights are manually created either by the CloudZero team or your own team. |
| CloudZero | These insights are created by the CloudZero platform using billing and usage data to identify problems and/or optimization opportunities. |
| Trusted Advisor | These insights are generated by the AWS platform and are pulled into the CloudZero platform for better visibility. |
Status Values
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| New | The insight has recently been created and likely not reviewed or acted upon in any manner. |
| In Progress | There is active work going on to address the insight. |
| On Hold | The insight will be addressed, but work is not actively underway for the insight. |
| Ignored | The insight will not be acted upon. When this status is set, the insight's cost impact is no longer used in the Potential Savings or Open Anomalies calculation. Automated insights that are marked as Ignored will not be updated with any additional findings. |
| Addressed | All possible work to mitigate the issues referenced in the insight has been completed. These insights will factor into the Cost Avoidance calculation. |
Insights Summary View
Viewers, Editors, and Organizers can access their organization’s insights and anomalies at https://app.cloudzero.com/insights. The summary information provides information about total potential savings and cost avoidance for your organization as well as a table of individual insights that can be used to navigate into more detailed views for each insight.
Potential Savings and Cost Avoidance
At the top of the summary page, you will see some top line numbers indicating the potential savings for open anomalies and insights and cost avoidance. These numbers give an overall picture of potential savings and realized savings.
Open Anomalies is the sum of the cost impact for all open Anomalies - any anomaly that has a status that is not Ignored or Addressed. The potential avoided cost is shown for a 30 day period. These savings are estimates of the potential savings that may be achieved, the actualized savings depends on many factors including how the issues in the anomaly are addressed
Potential Savings is the sum of the cost impact for all open insights - any insight that has a status that is not Ignored or Addressed. The potential savings is shown for both a 30 day and 12 month period. These savings are estimates of the potential savings that may be achieved, the actualized savings depends on many factors including how the issues in the insight are addressed and whether all resources referenced in the insight can and should be addressed vs ignored due to many legitimate reasons.
Cost Avoidance is the sum of the realized savings for all insights in the status of Addressed. This represents savings realized due to costs not incurred because of optimizations or costs saved due to addressing issues. Cost avoidance is calculated for each insight that is marked Addressed and is either an automated insight with the source of CloudZero or a manually created insight with a valid Explorer link filtered to the details of the insight. The cost avoidance of an insight is updated daily for the first 30 days after it was marked Addressed. The calculation is based on the internal queries used for automated insights, the filters in the Explorer link for manual insights, or for anomalies the cost impact is used as the cost avoidance when the insight is marked Addressed.
Cost Avoidance Formula
If X is the number of days since an insight was marked Addressed and is between 1 and 30, then the cost avoidance is the cost of the resources over X days before the insight was created minus the cost of the resources over X days since the insight was addressed. For example, if an insight was opened on September 1st and then marked Addressed on October 1st, and you look at the insight on October 7th, the cost avoidance will be the cost of the resources from August 26th through September 1st minus the cost of the resources from October 1st through October 7th.
The cost impact and cost avoidance numbers are calculated using different data, depending on the source of the insight. The following table describes how they are calculated.
| Source | Cost Impact Calculation | Cost Avoidance Calculation |
|---|---|---|
| CloudZero | Automated insights generated by the CloudZero platform use internal queries from the billing and usage data to determine the cost impact of the insight. The cost impact is for the 30 days prior to the creation of the insight. | Cost avoidance for Automated Insights uses the same formula as cost impact, but applies it over the period of days before the insight was created minus the same time period after it was addressed for a maximum time period of 30 days. |
| Anomalies generated by the CloudZero Platform use internal queries from the billing and usage data to determine the cost impact for the Anomaly. The cost impact is over the anomaly period. | Cost avoidance for Anomalies uses the same number that is calculated for cost impact. | |
| Manual | The cost impact of a manually created insight is entered by the person creating the insight and is based on their own calculations. | The cost avoidance uses the Explorer link to calculate the costs for the period of days from before the insight was created and uses the same link to calculate the costs for the same number of days after the insight was addressed, up to a maximum of 30 days. If no link is provided, then the cost avoidance cannot be calculated. |
| Trusted Advisor | The cost impact for Trusted Advisor insights is provided by AWS. | Cost avoidance cannot be calculated for these insights as the formulas used by AWS are not published. |
Insights Table
A table of all insights is shown on the summary page. This table can be filtered and sorted in various ways. Any insight in the table can be clicked on to see details of the insight.
Exporting Insights
You can export all Insights, Anomalies, and Affected Resources to their own CSV files.
Filtering and Sorting
You can filter insights by dimension and/or attribute, and then sort the results. This allows you to view a subset of insights directly associated with the business context that matters to you.
Filter by Dimension
For example, you might add a dimension filter to view only the insights for a specific Azure subscription. Or if you've created a custom dimension for your organization's products, you could add a dimension filter to view the insights associated with both Product A and Product B.
CloudZero supports filtering insights by the following dimension types:
- Custom dimensions
- Core cloud provider dimensions
- Additional cloud provider dimensions
- Tag dimensions
- Kubernetes dimensions
Add a Dimension Filter
To add a dimension filter:
-
Log in to CloudZero and navigate to Insights.
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Select Add Dimension Filters:
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Search for or select a dimension from the drop-down list. For example, Account:
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Search for or select one or more values to apply to the filter. For example, 123456789012:
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Optionally, select Add Another Filter and repeat steps 3-4 to add another dimension filter:
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Select Apply when you are ready to apply all filters:
The table of insights will display only the insights that meet the criteria you selected in your dimension filters:
Note that CloudZero updates the URL to include the selected filters. This means you can copy the URL and send it to someone else, or bookmark the filtered list of insights.
Remove a Dimension Filter
To remove a dimension filter, select the X next to it.
Filter by Insight Attribute
You can also filter insights by one or more of the following attributes:
- Status
- Source
- Category
- Effort
To filter insights by attribute, select an attribute column and then select one or more values from the drop-down menu.
For example, you can display only anomalies by selecting the Category filter and setting it to Cost anomaly:
Sort Insights
You can sort insights in ascending or descending order by one or more of the following fields:
- Impact
- Title
- Category
- Status
- Effort
- Last Modified
Quick Updates
You can also update the Status and Effort directly:
The status of an anomaly can be viewed and changed from the Explorer as well. Open the ANOMALIES & EVENTS sidebar, expand a specific anomaly, and use the dropdown to update the status.
Insight Details Page
Clicking on any Insight will dive deeper into the Insight Details page, where you can:
- Edit Status, Effort, and other top level metadata
- Add Comments
- View Affected Resources
- Note: this is not available for all Insights.
Authoring Insights
You have 3 ways to author insights:
- Insights Page
- Explorer Page
- API
Authoring with the Insights Page
The Create Insight button above the Insights Table opens the Create Insights Modal:
Authoring with the Explorer Page
The Create Insight button next to the page title opens the Create Insights Modal with the Link field pre-populated to match your current filter selection.
Authoring with the API
Alternatively, you can use the /v2/insights API directly via this documentation site.
Insights Sources
Manual Insights
We regularly evaluate your company's cloud spend manually and provide cost trend observations and recommendations for cost optimizations in your cloud environment. Most insights will link to the Explorer or a Report that will enable you to visually understand the insight's cost impact.
Automated Insights
The CloudZero platform also automatically creates insights from observations across all of your cloud spend. Insights created in this way will have the Source field set to 'CloudZero' with a cost impact, title, and description specific to the potential savings identified.
Automated Insights include the following:
AWS
- Active EC2 Snapshots Older Than 90 Days
- Consider Eliminating Spend on IPv4 Addresses
- Consider Intelligent-Tiering or Lifecycle Rules for S3
- Expensive Cloudwatch Logs
- High Data Retrieval Costs for S3 Glacier Storage
- High Ratio of S3 API Costs to Storage Costs
- High S3 Administrative Fees
- Non-standard API Requests for S3 Exceed Threshold
- Older Generation Instances Detected
- RDS Snapshot Costs Are Higher Than Expected
- Redundant Cloudtrail Usage Detected
- Unused NAT Gateways Detected
- Upgradable EBS Volumes
GCP
- Standard Storage Class Exceeds Target Threshold
- Disk Snapshots Exceeds Target Threshold
- Standard Disk Below Target Threshold
- Multi-Region Storage Exceeds Target Threshold
Azure
- Premium Disk Storage Reservations
- Redis Cache Reservations
- PostgreSQL Database Reservations
- MySQL Database Reservations
- SQL Database Reservations
AWS Trusted Advisor
CloudZero monitors AWS Trusted Advisor for recommendations, including affected resource information, from across all of your AWS Connections. Insights created in this way will have the Source field set to 'Trusted Advisor' with a cost impact, title, and description specific to the potential savings identified.
GCP Recommender
CloudZero monitors a list of Recommenders for recommendations, including affected resource information. Insights created in this way will have the Source field set to 'GCP Recommender' with a cost impact, title, and description specific to the potential savings identified.
Anomalies
CloudZero automatically uses your cloud’s billing data to detect and flag abnormal spend events down to an hourly granularity. Insights of this type have the Source field set to 'CloudZero' and the Insight type is ‘Cost Anomaly’ with a cost impact, title, cost graph and description specific to the potential savings identified. Some Anomalies include a table of affected resources. Learn more about Anomaly Detection.
Updated 18 days ago