The Optimize feature continually analyzes your environment and automatically generates Recommendations that will help your organization save money and avoid costs. Optimize collects the information for Recommendations from a variety of sources, including billing and usage data, resource utilization, and configuration detail. Each Recommendation contains observations about unexpected costs, further insight into affected resources, and specific suggestions for optimization.

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All of your manual and custom Insights are now on the Insights tab on the Optimize page. Migration is automatic. To see Anomalies, use the new Anomalies option in the CloudZero top navigation.

Optimize Overview

To discover all the different optimization opportunities across your environment, select Optimize from the CloudZero top navigation to open the Optimize Overview tab.

The Overview tab highlights your optimization opportunities, showing your total spend over the past 30 days, the total monthly potential savings, and the number of open Recommendations.

You can group the open Recommendations by different Dimensions, such as Account, Region, or Service, as well as by Custom Dimensions defined in CloudZero, such as Team or Product.

The Recommendations shown depend on your role and the specific data access filters that have been applied. For example, if your role has access to a single account, only Recommendations associated with that account are shown.

Recommendations

To view details about your recommended actions, select the Recommendations tab or drill down from the Overview visualizations into a specific subset of Recommendations.

On this page of specific Recommendations, you can search, filter, or group Recommendations by a variety of Dimensions.

Search Recommendations

To search for Recommendations, click the search text field above the table that lists the Recommendations and type your query.

Search looks for Recommendations across your entire environment and matches the Recommendation ID, terms such as the title, and any other properties in the table of Recommendations.

Filter Recommendations

You can use filters to see only the Recommendations you need to review. You can apply filters to most Dimensions in CloudZero and filter by most Recommendation properties. You can also apply different operators such as is or is not filters and combine filters to show all.

To apply a filter:

1. Click the Add Filter button above the table.
2. To find the filter you want to apply to the current list of Recommendations, navigate through the filter menu or use text search.
3. Click the filter that you want to apply.

You can filter by the following Dimensions in CloudZero:

Account: The IDs for the cloud account where the Recommendation’s resource is located, for example: Azure subscription ID, GCP project ID, AWS account ID.

Category: The type of Recommendation, for example, optimization.

Cloud Provider: The cloud providers, for example: AWS, GCP, where the given Recommendation’s resource is located.

Effort: How much effort: Low, Medium, or High, is required to address the insight.

Insight ID: Unique identifier for the type of optimization Recommendation.

Potential Savings: The current expectation of the potential savings from addressing the Recommendation. The amount of potential savings is calculated based on real cost against a projected 30 day window. This value does not indicate a guaranteed amount of savings, as different approaches to address the Recommendation may result in different amounts of savings.

Region: A component of an element, the cloud region where the Recommendation’s resource is located.

Resource Name: A component of an element, the resource name associated with the Recommendation.

Resource Type: A component of an element, a resource type, for example, BigQuery: job or S3: bucket for the given Recommendation’s resource.

Service: A component of an element, the cloud provider service type for the given Recommendation’s resource.

Source: The source of the Insight, for example: CloudZero.

Title: A short imperative statement describing the Recommendation action.

Work Item: The Jira work item associated with the Recommendation.

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If you would like to filter by additional CloudZero Dimensions, reach out to your FinOps Account Manager.

Use quick filters

You will see default quick filters above the table that apply filters for the Recommendations as follows:

• Open: Display recommendations with a status of either Not Started or In Progress.
• Addressed: Display Recommendations with a status of Addressed. These Recommendations can have a status of Addressed due either to manual action or to automatic detection based on continual analysis by CloudZero of the Recommendations.
• Ignored: Display Recommendations with a status of Ignored.

Group Recommendations

In the Recommendations table, you can group Recommendations by any of the properties. Select None if you want to remove all groupings. This is especially useful when you are applying ordering and filters. When a group by has been applied, sorting by a property will affect all Recommendations listed in the group.

Beside each group, you will see the total potential savings for all Recommendations in the group.

Choose Columns

To choose the properties to display on Recommendations in the table, select the Columns button above the table.

This is different from filters; filters refine the list to show only Recommendations with certain properties, while the Columns option shows all Recommendations but hides or shows columns in the Recommendation table.

Columns include all the enabled CloudZero Dimensions.

Take actions

To display the action bar above the table, select a Recommendation or a set of Recommendations. From the action bar, select the action that you want to take.

• Change Status: Change the status for the selected Recommendations. The status helps manage a workflow for the Recommendations.
• Change Effort Level: Change the effort level for the selected Recommendations. This field indicates how much effort, Low, Medium, or High, is required to address the Recommendation. Each Recommendation contains a default value for the required effort level.
• Post Comment: Post a comment about the selected Recommendations.

Recommendation details

Select a Recommendation to open a side panel with additional detail and context about the Recommendation.

• In the Overview, you can review the description of the Recommendation, which explains how a Recommendation was generated and the steps in remediation to take in order to realize the potential savings. There is a graph displaying the real cost over the past 30 days for the associated resource(s). You can select View in Explorer to open a new tab and interact with cost data through the Explorer.
• In the Resource Details, you can review additional configuration details and tags associated with the resource.
• In the Comments, you can view, add, edit, and delete comments to help facilitate discussions about how best to act on the Recommendation.

Insights

Insights are user-generated observations on cost trends or optimizations in your environment. You create Insights in the Explorer and they are displayed on the Insights tab.

To create an Insight:

1. Navigate to the Explorer and select Create Insight.
2. Enter a title, description, and category, and optionally a cost impact.

The Link to Details will automatically populate with a direct URL to the relevant place in the Explorer.

Automated Insights

The CloudZero platform also creates Insights automatically 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.

CloudZero creates Automated Insights for AWS, Azure, and GCP.