Reconcile AWS Costs within the platform: Costs within a Perspective View are not Matching Up

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

 

Perspectives offer extreme flexibility and customization to how you can view your environment but many perspectives may not be fully built and could not be inclusive of all the desired infrastructure.  This document will go through how to diagnose whether or not a perspective is the cause of a discrepancy.

Resolution

Confirm Total Overall Costs Line Up

This is the most important step in the process as it not only confirms that all cost data is being collected correctly but that information provides confidence in the metrics.  This should be a quick process by following these steps:

• Pull together a grand total of all costs for the time period in question from the cloud provider (generally it's easier to limit scope to a specific month)
• Reference that same data set within CloudHealth with all filters and categorizations removed

The totals should line up. This is good news because it shows that all cost data is captured and the conversation is no longer about missing or added cost, but categorization.

If the costs do not line up, you may want to create a ticket to Technical Support to investigate further.

 

Review the Comparison with Perspective Views

Revisit the initial discrepancy and make sure that the comparison is fair.  If the perspective view is indeed showing numbers that are not lining up as expected, there are a couple actions that you can take to try and determine the cause.   In most cases, perspective related discrepancies are due to configuration issues or confusion with how the created perspective is grouping data as opposed to a data issue.  These steps will help diagnose the issue.

 

Check Perspective Status

Review the perspective that is being used and confirm that it's updated and fully functioning.  

You can also view the status of a perspective by navigating to SETUP > PERSPECTIVES and taking note of the indicator:

You will want to make sure a teal checkmark is associated to the perspective the customer is referencing otherwise it's likely the information is not being fully represented within reporting.

 

Review Perspective Configuration

The next step is to get an understanding of the grouping methodology being utilized.  The best way to do that is to take a look at the configuration that appears in the perspective itself.  Navigating to the "Groups" tab and clicking a group will give you information as to how it was formed:

The above example is a very complex configuration but this area is a great resource to get detail into how the perspective was created.  This can also help reveal if there the configuration is potentially incomplete or not optimized. 

Be sure to re-evaluate the rules associated to the perspective groups as that may be enough to explain the discrepancy.  

 

Assets Not Allocated

Assets Not Allocated is essentially an "everything else" group that contains assets that have not been pulled in from their grouping methodology.  It's completely normal for a perspective to not be 100% allocated and the remaining % will fall into Assets Not Allocated.  Be advised that perspectives will include all historical assets in the calculation of the % so it's usually impossible to fully allocate everything to 100%. 

 

Be Aware of Tagging Practices

Some cost may not be allocating to the correct group simply due to tags not being applied correctly or there are multiple tags with different spelling/capitalization that have not all been consolidated.  It's recommended that tagging practices are strict and one official spelling of a tag (i.e. "Owner" instead of "owner" or "OWNER") is chosen as any variation of capitalization will be considered a unique tag.  For perspectives using tags, ensure the following process has been followed in this order for ALL spelling permutations of the tag in question:

1. Asset type Object = "Asset"
2. Then the process is run again with Asset type Object = "Amazon Taggable Asset"

This will ensure that any infrastructure not captured in the "Asset" gather tree search will be found and can then be merged into the appropriate groups.

 

Conclusion

Once the overall baseline regarding overall cost matching up is established, the issue likely will shift into a perspective optimization and maintenance exercise.  If there are still issues or questions associated to any strange data that appears be sure to create a ticket to Technical Support to investigate further.