Access to critical business data, such as cloud cost data, is both incredibly important for finance, engineering, and DevOps teams, but also a privilege that should be managed carefully.
This month, our engineering teams put a major focus on developing industry-leading capabilities related to access control, while also making it easier for people who require certain kinds of data to get it where it needs to be.
Check out the most recent enhancements we’ve rolled out in the last few weeks, and don’t forget to subscribe to the CloudZero blog to stay up to date with all of our updates going forward.
Enhanced User Access Controls Via Groups
What it is: CloudZero now gives administrators the ability to control user access to spend data through the creation and management of user groups. This new functionality allows administrators to create groups in the CloudZero console, assign access rules to each group, and then add users to the group that aligns precisely with the level of access or visibility they need in the platform.
Because the access controls for these groups are built on top of the Dimensions functionality in CloudZero, administrators are able to get extremely granular with the group-level permissions they create.
For instance, they could create a group for the Engineering team of a certain business unit and allow the members of that group only to see the resources and cloud costs related to that specific business unit.
Alternatively, they could make user groups based on specific cloud providers, cloud accounts, product features, certain types of billing line items, resource owners, specific resource tags, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.
Customer value: This new capability gives administrators complete control and flexibility to both maintain data security and provide perfectly curated experiences for the users within their CloudZero console.
Particularly in large enterprises where there are data and cost sensitivities, or where the vast amount of data can make it difficult to find the information users are looking for, this will greatly improve the experience of both administrators and daily users of CloudZero.
Status: Limited customer beta
Enhanced Databricks Integration
What it is: CloudZero has released a new in-platform install experience and a new delivery model focused on current and future customers utilizing our Databricks billing connection.
This enhancement eliminates the previous containerized, self-managed integration and replaces it with a simple, in-platform setup experience for ingesting your Databricks cost data into the CloudZero platform.
Customer value: This improved integration makes it significantly easier for customers to set up an integration with their Databricks environment in order to explore costs, allocate spend, and drive better decision making related to their Databricks investments.
Status: Limited customer beta
Single Savings View
What it is: A new combined view in the CloudZero console aims to unify our optimization Insights and Anomalies in a single tab so that users can view and manage all their savings opportunities in one place and improve their remediation workflow.
Now, when users get a notification that an anomaly has been detected in their environment, they are sent to a new anomaly details page, which contains a 90-day cost graph to visualize and provide context about the issue.
From this page users can also add comments, set effort level, and manage the status of each anomaly. And finally, users are able to view the sum of the impact for all open anomalies for the past 30 days, as well as a summary of the cost avoidance for anomalies they’ve already addressed.
Customer value: This new experience helps users streamline the process of understanding and responding to costly anomalies in their cloud environment, saving precious time and reducing the mean time to remediate, as well as summarizing the impact of potential savings and avoided costs for reporting purposes.
Status: Limited customer beta
User Data Export
What it is: Users now have the ability to export user data directly from the CloudZero console with the click of a button. With this, administrators can export user details such as email and role into a CSV so they can review and share that data with necessary stakeholders.
Customer value: This small but mighty feature makes it incredibly easy for administrators to export this data for purposes of auditing who in their organization has visibility into cloud cost data.
Status: Generally available
And More!
Align with all of that, we also have some smaller incremental improvements, including:
- The ability to update, replace, and remove telemetry records previously sent in to the CloudZero platform.
- A new display in the Explorer side panel that shows anomaly start and end date for improved contextual awareness.
- A new horizontal main navigation in the console that makes it significantly easier to find the feature or page you’re looking for (and it looks great, too).
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