Cumulative Savings and Investments Charts

Important:

The method for tracking savings and investments has been enhanced to accurately report the impact of actions on your cloud expenses. This enhanced tracking began in version 8.9.3. For cumulative savings and investments before this release, see the Legacy Cumulative Savings and Legacy Cumulative Investments charts.

Actions for your cloud workloads usually have cost savings or investments attached to them. For example, deleting unattached volumes can lower your costs significantly (savings), while scaling a VM to a different tier to improve performance could incur additional costs (investments). These charts highlight total savings and investments as a result of executing actions directly in Turbonomic and externally (for example, through your cloud provider). Turbonomic uses billing data from your cloud provider to calculate savings and investments.

These charts display in the built-in Cloud Executive Dashboard. You can add these charts to the default views in the Home Page or to your custom dashboards.

Note:

Billing data from your cloud provider generally takes 1 to 2 days to update fully. Savings and investment figures may change until the data is fully updated.

In the Cloud Executive Dashboard, scoped users can see data for the entire cloud environment.

Scale Actions

Scale actions involve moving an entity to a different compute tier or adjusting the entity's allocated capacity. Currently, Turbonomic calculates savings and investments when scaling the following entities:

  • VMs (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud VMs)

  • Volumes (AWS and Azure volumes)

  • Databases (Azure SQL vCore/DTU and Cosmos DB)

  • Document collections (for Cosmos DB)

  • Virtual Machine Specs (Azure App Service plans)

  • Database Servers (AWS RDS)

Turbonomic calculates savings and investment per entity. Calculation is based on the before-action and after-action costs.

  • Before-action cost is the cost of an entity before an action was executed. This is based on the cost snapshot on the day of action execution.

  • After-action cost is the cost of an entity as reflected in the daily billing report from the cloud provider.

Savings and investments are the total of all past scaling actions, with the exception that a scale in one direction (such as a scale up) reduces the amounts of previous actions in the opposite direction (such as a scale down), until one or more previous actions have no more effect.

To illustrate, consider three consecutive scale actions for a newly discovered VM and the effect of these actions on the calculated costs. Note that these actions are assumed to have been executed at midnight. Costs are calculated proportionately when actions are executed at other times of the day.

Day

Executed Action

Before-action Cost

After-action Cost

Investments

Savings

01

Scale up

$2

$5

$5 - $2 = $3

$0

02

Scale down

$5

$4

$4 - $2 = $2

$5 - $4 = $1

03

Scale down

$4

$2

$2 - $2 = $0

$5 - $2 = $3

Investment is the difference between the after-action cost on a particular day and the lowest ever before-action cost up to that day ($2 for all three days in the example). Savings is the difference between the largest ever before-action cost up to a particular day ($5 on Days 02 and 03) and the after-action cost on that day.

Note:

When the result of the calculation is a negative amount, Turbonomic considers savings or investments to be $0.

Turbonomic reads the daily billing report from the cloud provider to determine the current daily cost of an entity. Calculation also takes into account workload uptime (for VMs) and the effect of consecutive scale actions on the same workload.

Points to consider:

  • Calculation can adjust to varying VM uptime and discount coverage over time.

  • Calculation stops for terminated entities or entities that Turbonomic no longer discovers.

  • Calculation stops if there is a cost change in the entity that is not the result of a Turbonomic action.

Delete Actions

Delete actions always result in savings. Currently, Turbonomic calculates savings when deleting the following entities:

  • Unattached volumes (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud volumes)

  • Empty Virtual Machine Specs (Azure App Service plans)

  • Cosmos databases with provisioned throughput but without any underlying document collection

Turbonomic checks the daily cost of an entity on the day the entity was deleted, and uses that cost to calculate savings from that day onwards. The daily bill from the cloud provider is not used to calculate savings.

Stop and Suspend Actions

Stop and suspend actions always result in savings. Currently, Turbonomic calculates savings when:

  • Stopping parkable entities

  • Suspending idle dedicated SQL pools (used in Azure Synapse Analytics)

    Note:

    Dedicated SQL pools are represented as Database entities in the supply chain.

Turbonomic checks the hourly cost of an entity's instance type at the time the action was executed, and then uses that cost to calculate savings for the duration of the action. Calculation stops as soon as the entity is powered on. The daily bill from the cloud provider is not used to calculate savings.

Chart Settings

Click the More options icon (ellipsis icon), and then select Edit to modify the following settings:

  • Scope

    By default, the charts are scoped to your global environment. You can change the scope to one or several accounts, billing families, groups, or entities.

  • Timeframe

    • Last 7 Days or Last 30 Days – Each data point in the chart shows total savings or investments from previous days until the given day.

    • Last Year – Each data point in the chart shows total savings or investments from previous months until the given month.

  • Chart Type

    You can set the display to:

    • Text and Bar Chart

    • Text and Area Chart

  • Type

    Switch between the Cumulative Savings and Cumulative Investments views. You can also change the displayed data to just Savings or Investments if you do not wish to see how the savings or investment costs accumulate over time.

  • Group By

    This setting breaks down data points by the selected group. By default, no group is selected. Each data point only shows the total cumulative values for a given day or month, depending on the selected timeframe.

    The following groups are supported:

    • Account – Cloud accounts discovered in your environment

    • Action Type – Scale and delete actions

    • Cloud Service Provider – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

    • Entity Type – Virtual Machine, Volume, Database (Azure only), Virtual Machine Spec (Azure only)

    • Region – Regions for the entities

    • Resource Group (Azure only) – Available resource groups in your environment

    • Tag – Tag values for a given tag key

      Select a tag key from the list. For AWS, the tag keys are limited to cost allocation tags.

    For example, if you selected Account:

    • The chart represents each account as a distinct color.

    • When you hover on a data point, the chart shows a list of accounts, ordered from largest to smallest cumulative values.

    • The chart legend shows the individual accounts. Click an account to show/hide values for that account.

    • The chart and legend show up to 20 accounts and, if needed, an additional item labeled 'Others' that represents all accounts that are not in the top 20.

Show All

Click Show All at the end of the chart to view and download data in tabular format.

Data in the table that opens is downloadable. In that table, you can further break down data by resource names. To do this, go to the Details column and click the icon for a particular row. A second table opens. Data in this table is also downloadable.