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Cloudability Container Insights 2.0

By Apptio Community Member posted Wed July 10, 2024 12:22 PM

  

We are excited to announce a set of important enhancements to Cloudability Container Insights. Container Insights 2.0 introduces several improvements aimed at providing comprehensive insights into containerized workloads within Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters. This release features an updated layout and new capabilities, such as the efficiency score and expanded drill-down functionality. 

The new UI is the default landing page for the Container Insights feature. However, we have provided an option for users to easily toggle between the new and previous experience. To switch between the two, users can click the button referenced in the screenshots below. 


One key point to highlight is that we will not immediately deprecate Container Insights 1.0. Users will have the option to toggle between the versions for a certain period to allow them to become comfortable with the new interface. We will provide proactive communication about the future deprecation date for Container Insights 1.0. 

 Features Introduced 

Customizable Dashboards 

We’ve added customizable dashboards, allowing users to create visualizations and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to them 

Capabilities include: 

  • Default Dashboard: Includes pre-configured widgets for quick insights into total cluster cost, idle cost, and other essential metrics. Each user has their own default dashboard. 
  • Efficiency Score: New metric to assess resource allocation efficiency. 
  • Enhanced Visualization: Includes KPIs, trendlines, top X widgets, timeseries charts, and table widgets for a comprehensive view of your container footprint. 
  • Customization Features:
    • Cloud vendor filter support for dashboard-level filtering.
    • Multi-select functionality for cluster selection. 

Custom dashboard creation is supported in this release, along with various custom widget types. Users can also delete and add custom widgets in the default dashboard and set them as their custom dashboards.  

Treemap View 

The Treemap View provides a hierarchical visualization for clusters, enabling deeper analysis down to the container level: 

  • Hierarchical Visualization: Allows drilling down from clusters to namespaces, workloads and containers.
  • Efficiency Score Visualization: Integrates efficiency scores within the Treemap view for quick assessments. 

Both Dashboards and the Treemap View support global filters for date, clusters, and cost basis. Widgets are organized with KPIs at the top and tables at the bottom for optimal visibility. 

Detailed Drill-Down Capability 

Our enhanced drill-down functionality allows seamless navigation: 

  • From the dashboard, navigate to the table widget and select a cluster to view its namespaces in the Treemap View.
  • Select a namespace in the Treemap to explore constituent workloads.
  • Clicking on a workload reveals the containers within that workload. 

At each level of granularity, the user can understand the different cost components and efficiency score. 

Additional Information 

For in-depth container details within a workload: 

  • Click on a container to view the nodes it is operating on.
  • Updates to the details panel provide relevant information for each container grouping, ensuring users have access to the most logical details. 

 New Cost Column: Miscellaneous Cost  

As part of this release, we are introducing a new column on the Container Insights page called the 'Miscellaneous Cost' column, available in the Table widget. This column will reflect cluster-specific costs and will initially be null for all CSPs. We are working on making this first available for GCP, with plans to expand support to other cloud service providers (CSPs) in the near future. These costs encompass additional expenses associated with containerized applications that extend beyond nodes, volumes, and data transfer. They include various services and resources necessary for cluster operations, providing a comprehensive view of all costs related to running containerized applications. 

Cost Efficiency Score 

The Cost Efficiency Score is a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures the overall cost-effectiveness of resource allocation within a containerized environment. It compares the utilized cost against what is deemed the fair share or total cost. Understanding this score involves examining three main types of costs: fair share cost, utilization cost, and idle cost. 

 Fair Share Cost / Total Cost 

Fair share cost represents the proportion of the total node cost attributed to a container based on its allocated percentage of each resource (CPU, Memory, GPU). This is calculated by multiplying the node cost for each resource by the fair share percentage of that resource allocated to the container. The total fair share cost for a container is the sum of these amounts for all resources. 

Utilization Cost 

Utilization cost reflects the actual cost of resources used by a container. It is calculated by multiplying the node cost of each resource by the utilization percentage of that resource on the node. Like fair share cost, the total utilization cost for a container is the aggregate of utilization costs for all resources. 

Idle Cost 

Idle cost is derived by subtracting the utilization cost from the fair share cost. It represents the cost of resources that are allocated but not utilized, indicating inefficiency. 

Cost Efficiency Score Calculation 

The Cost Efficiency Score is calculated by comparing utilized cost to fair share cost, encapsulating the efficiency of resource usage across all resources within a container, namespace, workload, or cluster. This score helps identify inefficiencies and potential areas for optimization, such as cluster or node rightsizing or improving workload pod affinity constraints. 

 A lower Cost Efficiency Score indicates greater inefficiency, suggesting more significant opportunities for cost savings and optimization within the environment. Please reach out to support if you have questions around this feature or have questions.  



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Fri July 26, 2024 10:31 AM

Excellent work. I really like the efficiency score as we can track this as a KPI.

Quick question:  We need to make the information under insight available to users/teams based on views (similar to reports and dashboards).
What would be the role to apply or the best way to achieve this ?


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