New in Release 3.1: Understanding Your Spend, Scaling Compliance, and Enhancing Performance

Last updated on February 1st, 2023 at 2:59pm

The start of the year means new goals, new initiatives, and, of course, new budgets. Are you looking at where and how you spend your precious dollars? With this release, we make it even easier to evaluate your spend and identify savings opportunities. And if you decided to put your newly found savings toward growth and hiring, we’ve got scaling your organization covered too.

What Do You Spend and How Can You Save?

Generate Spend by Resource Reports

To develop a holistic understanding of your finances, you need to know more than just how much money you are spending. You need to know what you are spending it on. Our report builder helps you see exactly where your money is going, from top-level OUs and billing sources down to individual projects and accounts.

Now, we can help you drill even further down, straight to the individual resources. With spend by resource reports, you can select specific services that you would like resource data from, or you can include them all for a complete picture of your resource-level spend. Exported results make it easy to include this data in your financial planning for the future.

For more information, see our article Report Builder.

Use Tags and Labels to Filter Spend Reports

Want to get even more specific? Use filters when creating spend reports for granular, multidimensional reports that perfectly fit your unique needs. Our new filtering options are extremely flexible, letting you add as many filters as you want in any combination of tags and labels.

Combining tags and labels, your engineers can add tags around lifecycle environment, and you can enrich that data with other information. For example, if you were to add labels to indicate cost centers, you could run a report filtering down to production workloads from particular cost centers.

Filtering by tags also plays into our established unified tagging system. When you use the same tags across providers, Kion reports on them as if they came from one unified source, so your reports give you totals for the tag instead of fragmented results. Adding filtering by tagging to this system expands visibility into your multi-cloud environment—bringing essential information about all of your cloud providers together without losing specificity.

For more information, see our article Report Builder.

Export Savings Opportunities

Kion can scan your cloud environment regularly to automatically suggest savings opportunities based on the size of your cloud resources and their utilization over time. On average, customers who follow our savings opportunities recommendations save 30% on their cloud bills.

Now that you have identified your potential savings, it’s time to share the news! While Kion conveniently breaks down each opportunity in the Savings Opportunities Overview, you might have a different data visualization service you would like to use, or maybe you want to share the results with someone who doesn’t have access to Kion. That’s why we’ve made it easy to export your savings opportunities for flexible, easy sharing.

Download your savings opportunities as a .csv with a single click. The export takes into account any filters you have in place, only including the information that is important to you and those you are sharing with.

For more information, see our article Savings Opportunities Overview.

Scaling Your Organization with Consistent Compliance

Convert IAM Policies to AWS Service Control Policies

If you have an IAM policy that you would like to extend throughout your AWS account, you can easily clone it and convert it into a service control policy. As opposed to IAM policies that affect specific roles or groups, service control policies affect whole accounts.

Service control policies are an excellent choice for easily enforcing compliance at scale. With a service control policy, there is no forgetting to assign permissions to roles as new hires come on and no gaps between user creation and permission assignment. You can set it once and trust that it is enforced everywhere it needs to be.

For example, cloning an IAM policy as a service control policy makes it easy to take a policy like Deny-NonApprovedRegions and convert it from an IAM policy that only affects a subset of people to a service control policy that ensures everyone in the account is compliant as soon as they have access.

For more information, see our article Add an AWS Service Control Policy.

Clone AWS Service Control Policies

As you expand your organization with new positions and your business into new areas, we want to make it easy to address new situations and compliance concerns as they come up. Why start from scratch when creating a new service control policy when you have one that just needs a few tweaks? Quickly create similar policies by cloning an existing policy and configuring just the required details.

For more information, see our article Edit an AWS Service Control Policy.

Optimized to Grow with You

We’ve been making improvements just about everywhere! From database connections and compliance to syncs and caching, many of our background processes have been updated and streamlined to boost performance and stability throughout Kion. Wherever you are in the application, you can expect fast response times and reliable results, regardless of the size of your organization.

That’s Not All! 

These are just the highlights! For details on all of our new features, changes, and bug fixes, visit our Support Center. 

If you're new to Kion, welcome! You can schedule a free demo to learn more about our comprehensive cloud enablement software. You can also follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn for more cloud enablement news.