Overview

In late 2016, Apptio released a new set of capabilities around providing public cloud cost savings recommendations in Cost Transparency. The initial version of these capabilities involves an integration with AWS’ Trusted Advisor service and is focused on surfacing those cost savings optimization checks provided by Trusted Advisor.

Recommendations in Apptio

Recommendations surface within the Cost Transparency Public Cloud Dashboard as well as in more detail on the Recommendations and Reserved Instance reports in the Public Cloud report collection.  There are two primary types of recommendations: Reserved Instance recommendations and Usage recommendations.

Reserved Instance Recommendations

These recommendations are focused on optimizing Reserved Instance (RI) purchases.  They surface in the Reserved Instance dashboard and list out specific RI purchases your organization should make based on the actual use of on-demand compute resources.  The analysis includes the number and type of purchase as well as the potential cost savings associated with actually making the purchase (assuming future use is similar to past use).

Usage Recommendations

These recommendations are a more general set of recommendations associated with how cloud resources are actually used in your AWS environment.  Recommendation types include those associated with resources that are underutilized in your AWS environment.  An example is low utilization EC2 instances identifying costs savings associated with specific EC2 instances that exhibit very low utilization metrics and may be a candidates for downgrading or turning off altogether.

Deploying AWS Recommendations in Apptio

Recommendations can be deployed via the CT Apps - AWS Recommendations component in your Apptio environment. 

Ingesting Data Using Datalink

Data can be ingested using the Apptio Datalink AWS connector.  When this connector is configured to bring in AWS Trusted Advisor data, it will load each Trusted Advisor check into a new table in your specified Apptio destination.  Depending on how AWS is used in your organization, it may be necessary to create a connector for each AWS account for which you want to provide usage recommendations*.  Each connector will append into the same table in Apptio eliminating the need to manually append multiple tables. All tables will be placed in a Trusted Advisor category in TBM Studio's project explorer.

For more information on using Datalink to ingest Recommendations data, please refer to the DataLink 4 AWS Connector Guide (Outdated: Click for updated version) on TBMConnect.

*If you are using AWS consolidated billing, Reserved Instance optimization checks will be produced for all linked accounts associated with your master payer account

Configuring Recommendations in Apptio

Beyond installing the component and ingesting data via datalink, there are no steps necessary to configure Cost Savings Recommnedations within Apptio.  The tables created by Datalink (described in the previous section) that are associated with Trusted Advisor’s Cost Optimization checks will be automatically appended into the Recommendations Master Data table on which all analytics are based.  The Recommendations report and all metrics on the Public Cloud dashboard will light up automatically once data is brought in via Datalink.

A note on recommendations not related to cost optimization: Trusted Advisor provides checks beyond just cost optimization, including those for security, performance, and fault tolerance. The Datalink AWS Connector makes it simple to bring those checks in (there is an option in the connector to select or deselect each check category).  Non-cost optimization checks, similar to cost optimization checks, will be placed into one table per check. There are no transforms, master datasets, or analytics built on top of those tables, but the data will be available in your Apptio environment if you wish to use it.

Trusted Advisor Overview

Trusted Advisor is an online resource to help AWS customers reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing their AWS environments. Trusted Advisor provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. The service includes four separate sets of checks against the AWS environment – those checks are:

• Cost Optimization – “See how you can save money on AWS by eliminating unused and idle resources or making commitments to reserved capacity.”
• Performance – “Improve the performance of your service by checking your service limits, ensuring you take advantage of provisioned throughput, and monitoring for overutilized instances.”
• Security – “Improve the security of your application by closing gaps, enabling various AWS security features, and examining your permissions.”
• Fault Tolerance – “Increase the availability and redundancy of your AWS application by take advantage of auto scaling, health checks, multi AZ, and backup capabilities.”

For more information on Trusted Advisor, please refer to AWS documentation here: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/trustedadvisor/