Today, we are excited to provide you with a new view of your existing GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) inventory, utilization, and coverage. 

Similar to other Ternary reporting features, you can now customize and view your CUD look-back period to explore historical usage, and 'Include Future Commitments' modeling to understand current CUD usage against future on-demand usage. Once you have the timeframe you are interested in exploring, you can view charts related to CUD usage over the period and explore the specific CUD instances in your inventory.

And, of course, you can export your CUD utilization metrics and inventory for further analysis. For a more in-depth feature tour, view our brief CUD Visibility and Optimization video.

If you find that your current CUD inventory is missing or you see a message that the feature is not configured, this is most likely a missing GCP permission Ternary requires to query your CUD inventory. Please review our previous post Heads-Up! New GCP Permission Required to update your GCP environment with the required permission. 

A common use case for many organizations is to limit an individual or a team's visibility to only the cost and usage data for which they are responsible. This limitation could be by project, account, service or some combination of labels and tags. You are now able to provide this limited visibility through Enforced Scoped Views. To demonstrate, I begin by creating or editing an Organization Scope View setting a filter on project 'folder-project-01', and in the new 'Enforced For' pulldown, select my dev account to apply my Scoped View or, I could apply and enforce the Scoped View to my entire (Whole) organization.

Now, when I log into Ternary with my dev account, I see that the Enforced Scoped View 'My Org Scoped View' has limited my view of the cost data to project 'folder-project-01'. Enforced Scoped Views provide the foundation for Ternary to layer on new data segmentation features to support your organization's data security and compliance requirements. 

Hi there! We are hard at work preparing to release a significant enhancement to our GCP Committed Use Discount (CUD) feature. To take advantage of the new feature, there is a simple action required on your part to grant a new permission to your GCP Ternary service account. The new permission is compute.commitments.list  We recommend adding the permission now to avoid a disruption when the feature goes live. We plan to launch the new feature in early January 2023.

If you created a custom role in your GCP environment and assigned the role to your GCP Ternary service account, simply edit the custom role adding the compute.commitments. list permission to the role. That's it.

If you assigned built-in GCP roles to your GCP Ternary service account, we recommend creating the custom role described in our GCP Onboarding Instructions. In the onboarding instructions, jump down to Step 4. Grant Ternary Permissions using Cloud Shell or CLI to create your custom role and bind the role to your Ternary service account. You only need to complete Step 4. After successfully creating the custom role and binding the role to your Ternary service account, you can safely remove the built-in GCP roles assignments from your Ternary service account. 

Going forward, we will update the YAML and Terraform files in our Github repo with any new GCP permissions required for future features. We believe this approach follows the best practice of least privilege assigning only the specific permissions Ternary requires to your Ternary service account.

We are excited to share the release of our new Google Cloud Storage Visibility feature to help you better understand your bucket storage cost and usage, and to make insightful optimization decisions. With Storage Visibility, you can easily view your aggregate bucket storage costs across projects, GCP regions and GCP storage classes. At the same time, you can view associated usage metrics such as data transfer, operations and storage class. We also think it is becoming increasingly important to know which GCP regions are carbon neutral so your optimization decisions may include sustainability with cost and usage metrics. You will find Storage Visibility under Insights.

Below your aggregate cost charts, you can explore all buckets in your organization and quickly filter a particular project, region or both. (Pro Tip: Click a project, region to filter on the dimensions). Clicking 'View Buckets' (3 stacked dots) will launch a new window with bucket and object details. From here, you can view object counts, bucket lifecycle policies and any optimization recommendations associated with the buckets. For further exploration, you can export the results as a CSV. 

Adding to our already rich collection of report types, we are happy to announce pie charts are available for you to start using today. After adding your measures, groupings and any filters, simply select 'pie' as your chart type. Pie charts are also already available in Dashboards. 

We are excited to share that you will now be able to visualize and report on your GCP Carbon Footprint in Ternary using GCP's carbon footprint data collection and methodology. Configuring your GCP and Ternary environment is very straightforward requiring a new export on the GCP side and enabling carbon footprint ingestion on the Ternary side. Once configured, you will find a new data source and collection of carbon measures in the Ternary Reporting Engine to quickly view your carbon impact based on your specific usage. In generating your Carbon Impact reports, you can continue to use existing GCP labels and any Ternary Custom Labels to group and filter your results. To configure your GCP Carbon Footprint export and configure Ternary to ingest your GCP Carbon Footprint export, follow the steps in our Setup Guide. Once configured, you can create a report using the Ternary Reporting Engine environment selecting the 'Carbon Impact' data source, carbon measures, and any groupings and filters.

In the resulting chart and table, you can view (and export) your total monthly carbon footprint. If carbon footprint is a new area of interest for your business, our Setup Guide includes detail on the carbon measures and references to learn more. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Sometimes you just need to quickly view costs from a different angle such as total cost for a given set of categories over time. We recently released an enhancement making it super easy to pivot your report's x-axis data dimension or stick with the default time series layout. In the example below, the default time series layout shows categories and service description costs over 30 days.

You are now able to choose one of your groupings as your new x-axis dimension, category in this example, to view total spend in each category over 30 days. 

We are happy to introduce a new data freshness indicator in your Ternary cloud configuration. For example, by hovering over the 'cloud' icon in your GCP cloud configuration, you can see the most recent Ternary and GCP billing updates. 

We consider a Ternary update within the last 8 hours or cloud provider update within the last 24 hours healthy or a green data freshness indicator. When we detect a Ternary update greater than 8 hours and less than 24 hours, or a cloud provider update greater than greater than 24 hours and less than 72 hours, we consider this outside of healthy bounds or a yellow data freshness indictor. Finally, if we detect a Ternary update greater than 24 hours or cloud provider update greater than 72 hours, we consider this unhealthy as this example shows with a red warning data freshness indicator (my Azure free tier expired). 

It is now easier to explore your GCP BigQuery usage directly in the Ternary Reporting Engine. We have added a new 'BigQuery Usage' data source with associated BigQuery measures to view and export cost, slot consumption and job detail. And, of course, you can combine your BigQuery measures with any groupings and filters. Have a great Thursday. cheers!

We are excited to announce that Ternary is now able to provide deep Microsoft Azure visibility. With our newest supported cloud provider, Ternary provides visibility across all three leading cloud providers (GCP, AWS, and Azure). Onboarding Azure is quite easy; our Azure onboarding documentation will walk you through the detailed steps to configure and authorize your Azure billing export for Ternary ingestion.

After authorizing Ternary access to your Azure billing export, you are able to create Azure specific cost and usage billing data reports with a simple filter and Azure specific groupings to view your Azure subscription, resource group, and services.