as more and more workloads move to the cloud organizations need to keep tabs on their ever increasing cloud spend usually multiple teams are provisioning workloads using their own service accounts with minimal oversight stay tuned to learn how servicenow cloud insights can help you manage your cloud spend imagine that your aws spend has increased considerably in your organization over the last few months and that senior leadership wants you to help the cloud insights application in the itom optimization solution can help you with this problem cloud insights provides visibility into your cloud spending patterns as well as the ability to assign costs to the right groups provide recommendations for cost savings and the ability to efficiently execute on those recommendations in this demo we'll follow melissa who is responsible for managing aws costs and is a designated cloud insights admin melissa starts on the cloud insights dashboard which is aggregated and normalized all the aws billing and usage data to help her identify who organizations aws spend in the last 30 days her unassigned cloud resources which could mean unmanaged resources and potential cost savings by employing some recommendations let's drill down in the cost spend analytics dashboard starting with view analytics on the cloud analytics widget the overview tab is great for showcasing trends in overall spend for the last 30 days we can use the filters on the left to slice and dice the data for instance we can see how much a service account in a certain region has been spending the entire list of aws services and the categories they map to is available in our documentation on the forecast tab the current month value is a forecast from aws based on your past cost and your expected spend of the month on the last day of the month the current month value is equal to the actual spend for that month the next month value is a forecast from aws based on your past cost the forecast is available at the master account level only melissa needs to see which groups or individuals account for the most spend so she heads over to the spend optimization dashboard which is the third link on her favorites in the application navigator she notices that a lot of spend is unaccounted for this provides a good opportunity to understand her unassigned resources which is what she'll look at next she'll head back to the cloud insights home screen melissa understands that it's necessary to ensure that all the resources are correctly assigned to the correct group or individual this will help her to route cost-saving recommendations to the right teams she sees that the percentage of unassigned resources is high so she clicks view details on the unassigned resources tab or she can access it directly from her favorites list in the overview panel of the unassigned resources tab we see detailed information about those unassigned resources we'll click see all to see all the unassigned resources here we see the orphan resources that are running in aws these cost money but they're not assigned to anyone melissa should use the policy engine to assign these orphan resources to the correct team and individual she clicks on an unassigned resource to see which aws service account was used to provision it and what tags are aligned to that vm the service account details and the tag values are used by the policy engine to decide which assignment group and user this resource should be assigned to she heads back to the unassigned resources list and clicks on the policies the unassigned resource policies help you filter resources by using cloud or servicenow tags and cloud service account details and perform specific actions like assigning and reporting on these resources there are three types of policies auto apply which is a policy that is applied without any approval needed and results in a standard change auto apply after approval this policy is applied only after approval of the owner to whom this resource is to be assigned and report only this policy is for reporting purposes only no assignment is actually done the visual indicator in each policy indicates its type there are a few policies defined here let's drill down into one of them for more details on the first tab set policy properties you specify who the policy is to be assigned to on the second tab set resource criteria you specify the conditions by which the unassigned resource is assigned aws service account and tags are used to filter those resources then just save any changes and the policy will take care of any unassigned resources matching those criteria melissa can review the status of any of these resources based on policy engine assignments on the resources tab melissa knows it's not enough just to identify the errant teams and individuals and assign the costs to them she also needs to create recommendations on how they can cut costs generate change management and approval workflows to get consensus on those recommendations and find an easy and automated way to perform cloud actions to execute these recommendations from within the application cloud insights offers two types of recommendations right sizing and business our scheduling sometimes cloud resources are overpowered with too much cpu or memory wasting money on performance when it's really not needed this is where right sizing comes in all of your organization's billing and usage data is analyzed in order to make these right sizing recommendations melissa can see that through right sizing they have the potential to save over nineteen thousand dollars or fifty five percent of their last 30-day spend the right sizing algorithm looks for ideal candidates that have less than 40 percent usage for the last 14 days cloud insights also provides a confidence score to ensure that you right size the ones that give you a high cost saving with minimum risk high means within the same instance family and usage data greater than or equal to 10 days medium which is the same instance family and usage data greater than two days and usage data less than 10 days and low which would be for a completely different instance family in the section titled your spend and savings from right-sizing recommendations melissa can get the following insights resource is scheduled to be right-sized these resources will be right-sized the next time the right sizing policy is run this could potentially give her fifty two hundred dollars of savings in the next thirty days resource is not yet scheduled these are new recommendations for resources that have been identified for right sizing but have not been added to a schedule resources declined for right sizing these right sizing recommendations were declined by the owner of those resources let's look at the list of new recommendations we can triage these recommendations based on your organization's policy and confidence level each recommendation has a confidence level and a rationale let's select a few recommendations and then add them to a schedule like before there are two policy types here as well auto apply and auto apply with approval when you choose auto apply with approval a normal change request is created with the details of the right sizing recommendation when you choose auto apply a standard change is created now this is key since cloud insights is built on servicenow you can make use of features like change approval policy management etc to leverage the power of the platform a scheduled job is run to implement the right sizing recommendations another avenue to contain costs is to introduce a business hour schedule for your resources you may have development resources that do not need to run outside of certain business hours because of the frenetic pace of development these days dev teams neglect to clean up and resources stay running even when they're not needed using business hour scheduling you can define policies to identify which resources are running outside of their business schedule and their potential cost savings propose business hour scheduling requests for those resources and get approval from the assigned owners and automate the process of starting and stopping a vm instance based on its scheduled hours of operation in the overview tab here melissa can see the cis that have the most non-business hour spent these are prime candidates for business hour scheduling as she scrolls down on the screen she sees details about the resources that are scheduled for business hour scheduling note that it doesn't make sense to apply business hour scheduling for all resources you should apply it for resources that are expected to run only during defined hours on certain days let's switch to the policies tab where we manage business hour scheduling policies melissa reviews the policies in place to identify the non-business hour spent similar to undesigned resources business hour scheduling policies have three types auto apply auto apply after approval and report only again the visual indicator on each policy indicates its type there are a few policies defined here if we drill down into a policy we see the policies properties on the first tab indicating the action that should be taken on a resource that falls within the policy for instance all resources meeting the criteria for this policy would be subject to 8 am to 10 pm schedule for weekdays a flow will be run to stop this aws vm instance at the specified time on the next tab we see the filter to catch the resources that will fall under this policy here also we use the tags and the service accounts as before as we wrap up our demo it's important to remember that while it's possible to get cost saving recommendations from aws cloud watch aws cost explorer etc the main challenge is to implement these recommendations because you are likely to have multiple teams provisioning cloud resources using their own service accounts with cloud insights you get one application for billing ingestion and reports on your cloud spending as well as categorization of the available aws services into broader categories for analysis this gives you the benefits of the ability to assign costs to the right groups recommendations for cost savings and the ability to efficiently execute on those recommendations for more information on cloud insights check out the cloud management solution page on servicenow.com