Maestro Reports for Cost Analytics and Optimization

Billing and costs are one of the primary concerns for any business owner. Thus, Maestro sees great importance in providing its users effective cost optimization tools.

We provide a multi-level analytic mechanism that allows tenant management monitoring the process of cost optimization in an effective manner.

Maestro focuses on improving this multi-level analytic mechanism in order to make it optimal in usage.

Multi-level Analytic Mechanism for Cost Optimization

The first level of this mechanism is related to using budgets. Managers of tenant set quotas for their tenants and are informed about their depletion. Besides, Maestro allows setting additional actions for the new infrastructures intended for cost optimization: automatically stop all instances when the quota is depleted, requesting approval for the new instances, deny running new instance after the quota is depleted. More details about this mechanism are here.

The second level is presented with the Forecast report. This report informs about the costs spent in current month. This report is a cumulative report that provides statistics in dynamics. It is sent once a week. On the 8th day of the month, it provides details about the first week expenses, on the 15th day of the month it informs about the money spent during the two weeks past, etc. This report provides detailed statistics on the costs, even without budgets set for each cloud.

The third level is a Monthly All Resources Cost report. This report gives detailed information about the costs spent in the previous month. It is sent after the financial month closure. The Monthly All Costs report can be used to compare costs in two months.

Moreover, Maestro offers aggregated data approach. Within this approach, you can request analytics not for all your tenants separately, but to generate one report with full information about all your tenants cumulated in one document.

You can also delegate all the reports you receive to other tenant users.

Forecast Report

Forecast report is sent to primary and secondary contacts 4 times a month – on the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22th day of the month and shows the costs changes for the tenant in dynamics. What makes this weekly report valuable is that it provides managers with the month-to-date and predicted costs for the current month by regions, by services and in general for the tenant. The report sent on the 1st day of the month provides information about the total costs for the previous month. 

The report includes these sections:

• Total costs shows the month-to-date costs and predicted monthly costs for the current month.
• Top 15 predicted costs by regions lists the regions with the highest costs in your tenant during the reported period. This section gives month-to-date-costs, actual costs billed to your tenant during the previous month and predicted costs for the current month. Also, the section explains the difference between the actual and predicted costs for the previous and currents months.
• Top 15 predicted costs by services lists the services with the highest costs for your tenant in the reported period. This section gives month-to-date-costs for used services in the current month, actual costs billed for the services used in your tenant during the previous month and predicted costs for the current month. Also, the section explains the difference between the actual and predicted costs for using services for the previous and currents months.
• Total costs for different types of resources visualizes the total costs for different types of resources for your tenant during the previous year.
• Top 10 instances by usage lists the instances with the highest costs for your tenant in the reported period. Instances are ranged by the decreasing of their costs. The section describes the instance name, region name, instance parameters, active hours, and total cost.
• Instance usage by series provides instance monthly usage summary by instance series for your tenant for the previous 5 months.

The exact content of the report depend on the costs spent by the tenant. Here is an example of such a report:

Monthly All Resource Costs Report

With this release, we improved the monthly All Resources Costs report. Now it is sent monthly after the financial month closure on the 6th day of the month to the primary and secondary contacts. The report provides detailed costs for the tenant in a cloud for the previous month. Account optimization ratio report, monthly quotas report, and instance lifetime report sections were added to the report.

Now the report includes these sections:

• Total costs shows total costs for your tenant.
• Top 15 costs by regions lists the regions with the highest costs in your tenant during the previous 3 months.
• Top 15 costs by services lists 15 services with the highest costs in your tenant during the previous 3 months.
• Total costs by different types of resources visualizes the total costs of different resource types billed to your tenant during the previous year.
• Instance usage by series provides instance monthly usage summary by instance series for your tenant during the previous 5 months.
• Account optimization ration provides information on the time your tenant instances spend in running state during the latest closed billing month.
• Price quotas provides the information on monthly price quotas utilization rate on your tenants, by regions.
• Instance lifetime provides the lifetime of the instances existing in your tenants.

Below you can see the fragments of the report (as it is usually too detailed to fit into one screenshot):

Top 15 costs by regions

Total costs for different types of resources

Optimization ratio

Financial Dashboard

Maestro is pleased to announce its Financial dashboard. This modern solution will help cloud users track metrics, key performance indicators, and cost decision analytics in real time in order to ensure their consistent success in utilizing cloud recourses.

Financial dashboard provides cloud users with the real-time data about their infrastructures and costs.

This is achieved by displaying a collection of wizards with the relevant data. There are three types of wizards – table for displaying data in the table form, graph for displaying data in the graphical form, and metrics for displaying different metrics. These widgets can be rearranged on the dashboard (with the exception of the fixed ones), added to the dashboard via the Manage widgets wizard.

The default set of widgets displayed on the Financial dashboard is this:

• Daily aggregated cost shows the costs for your tenant infrastructure for the current day.
• Top costs by regions lists the regions with the highest costs in your tenant during the previous 3 months.
• Top costs by services lists 15 services with the highest costs in your tenant during the previous 3 months. 
• Resource costs visualizes the total costs of different resource types billed to your tenant during the previous months.
• Monthly quotas shows the monthly quota level on your tenants, by regions.
• Account optimization ration visualizes the time your tenant instances spend in running state during the latest closed billing month.
• Instance lifetime provides the lifetime of the instances existing in your tenants.

Here is the default view of the Financial dashboard:

Maestro includes a range of tools for multidimensional detailed review and analytics of infrastructure costs, as well as provides detailed and grounded information that can be used for effective optimization. The collected and properly organized data are empowered by convenient representation on the Financial Dashboard with real-life status representation.