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Consumption Analytics Documentation |
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Consumption Analytics Documentation |
This section contains the cumulative release notes for Cloud Cruiser version 4.0.x. The current release is version 4.0.5.
The following features are new or enhanced in Cloud Cruiser version 4.0.
Cloud Cruiser Insights is new in this release, offering several modules to unlock the value in your IT financial data with analytics:
The new What-If module lets you model different possibilities for a scenario using real historical data. Try out different pricing models, compare rates from public cloud providers, or model the growth of your business. What-If lets you compare the results for your bottom line.
This release offers the following enhancements in addition to Insights and What-If.
Bringing data into Cloud Cruiser and transforming it to add business intelligence no longer requires you to edit XML job files. Instead, data workbooks allow you to visually configure these actions, reducing development time and errors. A Microsoft Excel-like interface lets you see the results of each step and transform processor on real data as you work so that you don't have to run a job to see what it does with your data.
In previous releases, the account ID for a customer or for a usage record was stored as one string that incorporated each level of your account structure, separated by a designated character. This made for awkward displays with extra space between levels in an account ID and extra data transformation work to pad values and create a single account ID string before loading charge data into Cloud Cruiser.
With this release, an account ID is stored as separate values that do not need to be padded to a specific length. You can map collected data fields to them individually, select from existing values when creating customers, and view reports with compact IDs instead of extra space characters.
In previous releases, every collected resource that you wanted to load into Cloud Cruiser had to be charged the rate associated with that resource definition. Now rates are defined for services, which are made up of measures (the new name for resources). This separation of measures from rates enables you to:
HPE Consumption Analytics Portal, first introduced in version 3.0 and which powers the new Cloud Cruiser Insights modules, now enforces the permissions to customer data that you set for user groups. A user who views an Insights module or other HPE Consumption Analytics Portal report sees data only for the customers they are entitled to view based on their group membership.
The VMware vSphere Snapshot Collector can now collect licensing information from LicenseManager.
Some product terms and the names of batch XML objects have changed in Cloud Cruiser 4. See the following articles for details:
Version 4.0.4 introduced the ability to set a minimum commitment for a service, an amount customers are obligated to purchase regardless of their actual usage. This allows you to charge similarly to a mobile telephone provider, whose customers get a certain number of minutes per month for a flat fee and then pay by the minute for usage over that amount.
For a given service in a given rate plan, you can specify a minimum commitment per month, day, or hour. If a customer in that rate plan uses the minimum amount or more of the service, they are charged normally. If they use less than this amount, extra charges are added to bring them up to the minimum.
To configure a minimum commitment, when editing a rate plan show advanced options and use the Min Commit and Commit Interval columns.
In this release, you cannot set a minimum commitment for a service that uses Forward proration, and you cannot model minimum commitments in What-If.
Not all functionality from Cloud Cruiser 3.x is available in the initial 4.0 release. Please make sure the functionality you need is supported before choosing to install Cloud Cruiser 4. This section lists the specific collectors and reports that are supported.
The Data Workbooks window in version 4.0 supports the following collectors. If you need to use a collector not listed here, contact your HPE representative.
Universal collectors
All universal collectors are supported in version 4.0.
Native collectors
The following standard reports are supported in version 4.0. If you need to use a report not listed here, contact your HPE representative.
The Advanced Reports functionality is removed in this release. For flexible, ad-hoc reporting, use the My Insights module of Cloud Cruiser Insights.
The version number of the REST API has changed from v1 to v2 with this release, so the URL for each method has therefore changed. Also, the methods for resources have been replaced by methods for services.
Because of changes to the database schema and the radically different method for creating collections, there is currently no upgrade path from previous versions of Cloud Cruiser to version 4.0. HPE recommends that current customers continue using version 3.x until a process for migrating to the new architecture has been defined.
The following important bugs are open in the Cloud Cruiser 4.0 release:
| Description | Bug ID |
| When a Standard Invoice report contains a discount or surcharge, that line includes a drill-down link. This link should not appear because there is no usage information into which to drill down for a discount or surcharge, and the link returns error messages. | 4627 |
| The Cloud Cruiser service has a default Log On As setting of local service. If you change this setting and then upgrade Cloud Cruiser, the Log On As setting reverts to its default setting. To work around this issue, change the Log On As setting after upgrading Cloud Cruiser. | 3541 |
The following bugs were fixed in the Cloud Cruiser 4.0 release:
| Description | Bug ID |
|---|---|
| When a batch job that sent email messages was unable to connect to the specified SMTP server, the job could hang for ten minutes before failing with an error. The default SMTP timeout is now 30 seconds. | 3329 |
| The Microsoft Azure Collector completed with no errors or warnings when it found no report to download for the select date, giving you no indication that no data was available. | 3640 |
| Users imported with You can now explicitly set this flag with the new | 3486 |
| When viewing a report, if you tried to drill down to view data a level below the Account Level at which you ran the report, any records for an account ID starting with the letter 'z' did not display. | 3469 |
On Windows, the base directory for the directories in Administration > Configuration > General > Directories defaulted to a Windows short name such as C:\PROGRA~1\CLOUDC~3\ rather than the full Cloud Cruiser installation directory. | 2734 |
| Deleting the last row of a translation (lookup) table or adding a new row after the last row sometimes caused extra rows to be added to the table. | 1071 |
| When Analytics was disabled, saving any other change in Administration > Configuration caused an exception to be written to the application server log. | 3275 |
| If while editing an analytics report in the Cloud Cruiser Portal you closed that report's tab without clicking Done, the navigation pane on the left side of the window remained locked. | 3383 |
The following bugs were fixed in the Cloud Cruiser 4.0.1 release:
| Description | Bug ID |
|---|---|
| There was no way to specify that a collection should create a new output file with each run rather than overwriting a single output file for the select date. | 4575 |
| There was no way to create a JDBC collection from a Windows SQL Server database that used integrated security (Windows authentication). | 4290 |
| The Analyze function of What-If sometimes showed incorrect total charges for a model. | 4452 |
| A What-If model whose services all used passthrough rates showed no charges in the Analyze dialog box. | 4583 |
When creating a JDBC collection, if you opened the Advanced Configuration dialog box before entering a SQL Request, you received the error message Fetching Sample Data Failed and could not continue configuring the collection until you reopened the workbook. | 4576 |
| For OpenStack Ceilometer data sources, the Ceilometer Endpoint Type and Keystone Endpoint Type parameters added in version 3.6 were missing. | 4438 |
| In the Data Sources window there were separate data source types for VMware vSphere Performance and VMware vSphere Snapshot. Creating a data source of either type also produced a duplicate in the other. | 4589 |
| When creating or editing a fixed discount or surcharge, the Discounts/Surcharges window allowed you to select which services the discount or surcharge applied to. This setting is only relevant for a percentage discount or surcharge. | 4620 |
| If you attempted to navigate (such as with a browser bookmark) to a Cloud Cruiser Portal URL that corresponded to a page in a previous release but now corresponds to an intermediate item in the navigation pane, you received an empty blue window. | 4574 |
| The license file License files are now located in | 4588 |
| Warning messages in the Status dialog box of a data workbook were not descriptive enough to explain some conditions. | 4573 |
The following bugs were fixed in the Cloud Cruiser 4.0.2 release:
| Description | Bug ID |
|---|---|
| There was no way to create performance profiles or to set the aggregation interval for the VMware vSphere Performance Collector. The collector retrieved a default set of counters and used a default interval to aggregate counter records. | 4733 |
| A data workbook with VMware vSphere Snapshot collections from two or more data sources did not correctly provide entities lists because they wrote to the same file. The vSphere Collector now writes to a different entities file for each data source. | 4665 |
| When running a standard report, setting the Account Filter by selecting a customer in the list did not affect report output. This is because the filter used dashes rather than pipes to separate account levels. | 4724 |
| When editing a collection, sample data was sometimes captured more often than necessary. | 4655 |
| Editing the password for a vSphere data source from the Edit Collection wizard caused the collection to revert to default settings and also to refresh the data sample. | 4740 |
| When editing the Advanced Configuration for a collection, some collections appeared to freeze and others displayed a browser error message. This is because sample data was being captured but no message informed you of this and prevented you from attempting to edit your collection. | 4656, 4674 |
The following bug was fixed in the Cloud Cruiser 4.0.3 release:
| Description | Bug ID |
|---|---|
| When a measure had a passthrough rate but no passthrough cost, that rate appeared as 0 in reports. This is because the rate was not saved in charge records. | 4751 |
The following bugs were fixed in the Cloud Cruiser 4.0.5 release:
| Description | Bug ID |
|---|---|
| Some measure values were multiplied by 10,000. | 4673 |
| When saving a new rate plan for the first time, an internal client error appeared. | 4800 |
The following are the minimum hardware and software requirements for Cloud Cruiser and its components.
HPE recommends that you install Cloud Cruiser, Cloud Cruiser Analytics Server, and your database server on separate computers. These system requirements apply to that architecture.
You should also install HPE Consumption Analytics Portal Desktop on this computer.
You must use the 64-bit version of one of the following operating systems:
The Server Core installation option of Windows is not supported. The Cloud Cruiser installer requires a graphical user interface and cannot be run within a command window.
The 64-bit version of Java Standard Edition 7 (JDK or JRE) is required. Version 8 is not supported.
You can download Java at http://www.java.com/getjava. The navigation of this site changes often, so you might need to look carefully to find version 7 in 64 bits.
A database server is not included with the Cloud Cruiser installation. You must provide one of the following database servers:
Oracle is not supported by Cloud Cruiser 4.0 and 4.1.
For hardware and operating system requirements for this computer, see the documentation for your database server. Storage needs will grow as Cloud Cruiser accumulates data over time.
One of the following browsers:
As of the last update to this article, Cloud Cruiser has been tested with Firefox 32 and Chrome 37, and we continue to test with new, automated version updates of these browsers. The application should continue to function with such versions. However, some issues could arise that can only be resolved with subsequent patches to Cloud Cruiser or by reverting the browser update.
The documentation for Cloud Cruiser 4.x is located at Cloud Cruiser v4. At product release time, very little documentation is available, and we are continuously adding to it to fully document the release. For those familiar with previous releases of Cloud Cruiser, we recommend taking a look at Name changes in Cloud Cruiser 4 to learn the new names for objects you have worked with before.
In addition to the documentation available on this site, this release adds more help within the Cloud Cruiser Portal. This includes help for windows, dialogs, and the functions and parameters in Data > Workbooks.
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