August 2023 Summaries

Vantage has announced the integration of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) into its platform, allowing users to view OCI costs alongside those from other cloud providers like AWS and Azure. This integration supports companies that rely heavily on Oracle as their primary cloud provider by enabling a comprehensive understanding of cloud expenditures. Users can add multiple Oracle Cloud tenancies, with Vantage automatically ingesting and visualizing costs, and offering filters for detailed cost analysis by various dimensions such as service, tenancy, and region. The system provides secure, read-only access to OCI cost data via an IAM user and API key, ensuring data is updated daily. The integration supports historical cost data retrieval for up to six months and allows for the combination of Oracle costs with those from other providers for a complete financial overview. Vantage plans to further expand its support to additional cloud services, while also addressing feature requests from users.

Vantage has introduced a new feature allowing users to create custom dashboards for cost reporting, enabling them to compile various Cost Reports into a single view with customizable date range and period filters. This enhancement allows for more straightforward comparisons of different reports by standardizing date settings across all reports in a dashboard, addressing previous challenges where reports had disparate date configurations. Users can now include reports from multiple folders in a single dashboard, modify names and settings, and easily add or remove reports. The feature is accessible to all users, including those on the free tier, and offers unlimited dashboard creation without additional costs. While the default folder dashboards remain available, they are not shown in the main dashboard list but can be accessed directly from a folder. Custom dashboards can be shared via links, and reports can be organized alphabetically, though some features like global filters and report rearrangement are still under development.

In a world where cloud resources come with significant costs, Vantage Team provides a comprehensive guide for programmers to estimate monthly expenses for various cloud services, offering a breakdown of costs associated with common computing resources such as data storage, network traffic, CPU, and memory. The guide includes specific cost examples for projects using Kubernetes clusters, Postgres deployments, and self-managed Kafka services, highlighting the importance of understanding these expenses for effective budgeting and project planning. By providing a detailed list of resource costs, such as $30 per vCPU and $25 per 8GB memory, alongside insights into potential discounts and regional variations, the guide empowers developers to make informed decisions and optimize their cloud infrastructure spend. Additionally, it underscores the necessity of monitoring tools like custom metrics and logging, which also contribute to overall expenditure, and emphasizes the practical application of these estimates through examples, facilitating quick, rough calculations without complex tools.

Vantage has introduced a new feature that allows users to set custom alert thresholds for cost anomaly detection, ensuring that alerts are only triggered when cost increases exceed a predefined dollar amount. This enhancement enables users to receive notifications through Slack, Teams, or email when significant anomalies, such as a $10,000 increase, occur, allowing for more tailored monitoring in line with their specific spending levels or service requirements. Previously, alerts could be triggered by any cost increase above the trend, regardless of its significance relative to total expenditure. By configuring the alert threshold in the "Anomalies" tab of any Cost Report, users can better manage which anomalies warrant attention. The feature is available on all Vantage plans and functions independently of Budget Alerts, which are based on budget progress rather than cost anomalies. Anomalies below the threshold will still be detected and accessible for review but will not trigger alerts.

Vantage offers a more advanced solution for managing AWS cloud costs compared to Amazon's Cost Explorer, addressing several limitations that users face as their cloud spend and account complexity grow. Unlike Cost Explorer, which provides basic functionality and is limited to single-dimension groupings and broad cost categories, Vantage allows multi-dimensional grouping, detailed resource-level anomaly detection, and more granular access controls, making it suitable for enterprise-grade reporting. It also offers capabilities such as drilling down into specific costs like NAT Gateways, managing reserved instances across all services, and selecting views for amortization, credits, discounts, and taxes. Furthermore, Vantage clarifies complex cost categories such as "EC2-Other" by breaking them down into distinct line items, which simplifies the evaluation of costs associated with various AWS services. These enhancements make Vantage a robust tool for organizations looking to mature their FinOps functions and achieve comprehensive cloud cost management.

Vantage has introduced a new feature for its Cost Reports, allowing users to view costs by specific time intervals—day, week, or month—via a "By Date" toggle in the costs table, providing a more granular and comparative view of expenses. Previously, users could see costs graphically with flexible filters and groupings, but the exact totals for each date bin required hovering over chart bars. This new feature aligns the tabular view with the time series data displayed on the graph, offering a clearer perspective on costs for each period. All users, including those on the free tier, can access this feature, which maintains compatibility with the Vantage API and existing report exports. Additionally, users can save their "By Date" selections for future reference, with the ability to switch between cumulative, daily, weekly, and monthly views seamlessly.

Over the summer of 2023, the Vantage Team implemented a data pipeline using Google Cloud to transfer Salesforce data into BigQuery, enabling daily snapshots of their sales pipeline for improved business insights. The project aimed to capture key sales metrics such as pipeline coverage, close rate, and pipeline creation by taking daily snapshots from Salesforce, which were then stored in BigQuery using Google Cloud Data Fusion (CDF). They employed CDAP, now known as Google Cloud Data Fusion, to manage the ETL process, utilizing the Salesforce Batch Multi Source plugin to create daily snapshot tables, which were later transformed into a clean table for analysis. The team faced challenges such as managing Salesforce authentication resets and optimizing cloud costs, which initially spiked due to non-stop running of the pipeline. By enabling autoscaling on CDF, they reduced costs significantly. The setup allowed for the agile addition of new Salesforce fields into BigQuery, demonstrating flexibility in schema management, and helped inform strategic decisions in sales and marketing by providing a clearer view of their sales pipeline dynamics.

Vantage has introduced Budget Alerts, a feature that provides automated notifications to users when their spending exceeds predefined budget thresholds. Available to all Vantage users, including those on the free tier, this feature allows users to manage and customize alerts for each budget, determining the recipients of notifications via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. Users can configure Budget Alerts using dynamic percentage-based thresholds, specifying observation periods within a month, and can receive immediate notifications once a threshold is surpassed. Although there is no cost associated with activating Budget Alerts, the system currently supports notifications only for actual costs and does not accommodate static cost increase alerts or forecasting-based alerts. Additionally, users can manage multiple budgets, set global thresholds, and receive notifications about budget status, but cannot currently import AWS Budgets into Vantage or view historical alerts within the console.