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Consumption Analytics Documentation |
This topic explains how to optimize your cloud cost using the HPE Consumption Analytics Portal.
The HPE Consumption Analytics Portal's What-If feature allows you to model changes to your VMs and see the impact to your cost, comparing the current state of your workload against alternate states. You can create a What-If model for each decision you want to explore, such as downsizing over-provisioned VMs, moving to a different region, or even switching cloud providers. What-if compares your actual results to what they would have been for the same period, assuming different options.
To use What-If, you choose a period of actual usage to date, choose a specific set of VMs to model, change something about those VMs (region, size, etc.) to create an alternate state, then compare what your usage actually cost you to what it would cost you in that alternate state.
What-If supports Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Support for Google Cloud Platform is in development.
You can model the cost of your workload in a public cloud even if you’re not yet using that cloud provider. The HPE Consumption Analytics Portal regularly retrieves rates from both AWS and Azure, which means your model is always using up-to-date rates.
If you want to share a What-If model with others you can export it to a CSV file.
To use the What-If feature, you must have the Manage What-if permissions capability. See Permissions.
Before you create a What-If model, it's helpful to understand an example. Let's look at the following:
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The baseline period of usage is shown in the upper left of the page:
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An overview of your model's changes is shown in the upper right of the page:
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Resource panel: Shows the VMs from all of your AWS and Azure public cloud collections. Note this does not include Google Cloud Platform. The default columns shown are needed for What-If modeling, including the resource name and, if needed, an ID that uniquely identifies the VM. Note you can customize the table fields in the Tools panel. Toggle Tools with the pencil icon. |
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Baseline: Shows the specific service the VM is an instance of and the VMs actual cost for the baseline period. |
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Scenario: Shows the service you want to model. The baseline represents what is and the scenario represents what that would become. |
Since What-If is based on the HPE Consumption Analytics Portal’s tabular reports, you have most report authoring tools available to create a meaningful What-If model (for more information, see Reports.) For example, if you wanted to downsize over-provisioned VMs, you might start by sorting the table by CPU utilization percentage, to bring the least-used VMs to the top. You might also filter out VMs that are irrelevant to the current model, add contextual columns to identify the VMs that support a particular application or project, and group on a column to work with a segment of VMs at a time.
To create a What-If model
The scenario updates to show:
When you’ve finished creating a scenario that represents your alternate state you can save the model for future reference or update.
The following video is a high-level introduction to using What-If:
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