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Cost Management Terminology

Some terms used in Virtana Platform are common words but with meanings specific to the module being used.

Following are terms used in the context of Virtana Platform that you should be familiar with.

amortized costs

Distributes any up-front fees and monthly installments evenly across the reservation period.

attribute

Metadata created and assigned by your cloud service provider (CSP) that defines a property of a resource. You can use attributes in Virtana Platform to filter items to include in or exclude from a report.

blended costs

The averaged rates of the reserved and on-demand instances that are shared by multiple member accounts. The blended view recognizes relative usage of reserved instances, so accounts that make more use of reserved instances are allocated a higher proportion of those overall costs.

change request

The ability to submit ticket requests to modify your CSP environment based on recommendations from Idle Resources or Right Sizing Reports. The requests are configured as part of a policy in Cloud Cost Management and submitted to a change management system, such as Jira or ServiceNow.

cloud service provider (CSP)

A company that offers cloud-based services and solutions. Examples are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Also called cloud provider.

compute instance

An individual instance of a virtual machine (VM) or a physical server node that can be associated with an application or a move group (in Workload Placement). A compute instance can belong to only one application or move group.

consolidated billing

The grouping of multiple accounts into a single billing account, with one main "parent" account and related linked "children" for billing purposes. The child account information rolls up to the parent account. Equivalent to an AWS "organization".

Cost Explorer

A visualization tool that provides a view of your spend across different AWS Services. Use to get a clearer perspective of weekly, monthly, and quarterly spending trends for your business.

data source

An integration instance (such as AWS, Azure, or GCP), with an associated billing account. The billing account can represent a single account or multiple accounts, if doing consolidated billing.

entity

Equates to an entity in .

global report filter

Also called global filter. User-customized filters (tags and attributes) applied to data sources. They can be used to segment environments to identify savings within a subset of your environment.

GovCloud

GovCloud is an AWS cloud offering that restricts administrative access to U.S. citizens only. The region meets the requirements for U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and allows users to move Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) into the cloud. See the official AWS Guide for more information.

IAM role

An IAM role is an AWS identity with associated permissions policies. This role is used by Virtana Platform to communicate with AWS. The role provides temporary security credentials that only apply for the role session.

in-line policy

A user-created and user-managed AWS policy that you can embed in a single user, group, or role in AWS.

Management Account Permissions

Grants read-only access to collect billing files from a single AWS S3 bucket that can be located in a management account.

Minimal Cost Permissions

Grants read-only access to collect CloudWatch performance metrics and billing files. It is limited to only the AWS services for which Virtana Platform Cloud Cost Management provides cost reports.

organization

The entity under which specific workloads are grouped for migration and optimization, and to which a user and projects belong. An organization typically equates to a company, but can relate to a business unit of a company, etc

policy

Configuration parameters that a user can apply to a data source. In Cloud Cost Management, policies define the optimization constraints for Idle Resources and Right Sizing reports.

resource

Any compute instance, storage object, networking device, or other entity that can be created or configured within the CSP platform.

Scope of Analysis

The policy parameter that allows you to select which instances or entities (scope) the policy applies to. Settings include the CSP data source and applicable filters.

Standard Permissions

Grants blanket read-only access to collect CloudWatch performance metrics and billing files from AWS S3.

tag

A key/value pair or simple string used as an organizational label applied to resources. You create tags in your cloud service provider account.

unblended costs

The sum of the applicable rates times usage (rates x usage) for each shared resource in consolidated accounts. Unblended costs represent the usage costs on the day they are charged to you.

Virtana Platform

A cloud-agnostic SaaS platform offered by Virtana that is composed of multiple modules to help migrate, optimize, and manage workloads in cloud and hybrid environments.

Workload Placement module

Workload Placement is a module in Virtana Platform that de-risks and accelerates application or workload migrations for public or private clouds.

In this section:

Workload Placement is a module in Virtana Platform that de-risks and accelerates application or workload migrations for public or private clouds.

A company that offers cloud-based services and solutions. Examples are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Also called cloud provider.

Equates to an entity in .

An individual instance of a virtual machine (VM) or a physical server node that can be associated with an application or a move group (in Workload Placement). A compute instance can belong to only one application or move group.

Metadata created and assigned by your cloud service provider (CSP) that defines a property of a resource. You can use attributes in Virtana Platform to filter items to include in or exclude from a report.

A key/value pair or simple string used as an organizational label applied to resources. You create tags in your cloud service provider account.

Grants read-only access to collect billing files from a single AWS S3 bucket that can be located in a management account.

Grants blanket read-only access to collect CloudWatch performance metrics and billing files from AWS S3.

Grants read-only access to collect CloudWatch performance metrics and billing files. It is limited to only the AWS services for which Virtana Platform Cloud Cost Management provides cost reports.

An IAM role is an AWS identity with associated permissions policies. This role is used by Virtana Platform to communicate with AWS. The role provides temporary security credentials that only apply for the role session.

GovCloud is an AWS cloud offering that restricts administrative access to U.S. citizens only. The region meets the requirements for U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and allows users to move Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) into the cloud. See the official AWS Guide for more information.

A visualization tool that provides a view of your spend across different AWS Services. Use to get a clearer perspective of weekly, monthly, and quarterly spending trends for your business.

The entity under which specific workloads are grouped for migration and optimization, and to which a user and projects belong. An organization typically equates to a company, but can relate to a business unit of a company, etc

Distributes any up-front fees and monthly installments evenly across the reservation period.

The averaged rates of the reserved and on-demand instances that are shared by multiple member accounts. The blended view recognizes relative usage of reserved instances, so accounts that make more use of reserved instances are allocated a higher proportion of those overall costs.

The sum of the applicable rates times usage (rates x usage) for each shared resource in consolidated accounts. Unblended costs represent the usage costs on the day they are charged to you.

The grouping of multiple accounts into a single billing account, with one main "parent" account and related linked "children" for billing purposes. The child account information rolls up to the parent account. Equivalent to an AWS "organization".

An integration instance (such as AWS, Azure, or GCP), with an associated billing account. The billing account can represent a single account or multiple accounts, if doing consolidated billing.

A cloud-agnostic SaaS platform offered by Virtana that is composed of multiple modules to help migrate, optimize, and manage workloads in cloud and hybrid environments.

Also called global filter. User-customized filters (tags and attributes) applied to data sources. They can be used to segment environments to identify savings within a subset of your environment.

Configuration parameters that a user can apply to a data source. In Cloud Cost Management, policies define the optimization constraints for Idle Resources and Right Sizing reports.

A user-created and user-managed AWS policy that you can embed in a single user, group, or role in AWS.

The policy parameter that allows you to select which instances or entities (scope) the policy applies to. Settings include the CSP data source and applicable filters.

The ability to submit ticket requests to modify your CSP environment based on recommendations from Idle Resources or Right Sizing Reports. The requests are configured as part of a policy in Cloud Cost Management and submitted to a change management system, such as Jira or ServiceNow.

Any compute instance, storage object, networking device, or other entity that can be created or configured within the CSP platform.