Cost Anomaly Detection
Identify significant changes in your cloud spend and track down where they are coming from to take the necessary action to get them under control.
For complete help with cost anomalies, this topic includes the following subsections:
Prerequisite
Important:The Manage organization or View cloud costs role is required to access cost anomalies. For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.
How to Find Anomalies in Your Cloud Spend
Finding anomalies in your cloud spend enables you to track down the anomalous spend and take the necessary action to keep your costs in control.
To find anomalies in your cloud spend:
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Do one of the following: |
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Go to the Tabular View page (Cloud > Cost Optimization > Tabular View). |
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Go to Dashboards > Cloud. Select a dashboard with a table view. |
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To filter the data in the Tabular View or in the dashboard with a table view: |
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Click the Expand Widget button next to the Filters section, and then click the plus sign (+) next to Add dimension. A dropdown list appears. |
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Select the checkboxes next to the dimensions that you want to add. The values related to the dimensions appear. |
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Select the checkboxes next to the dimension values that you want to use to filter data in the Tabular View or in the dashboard with a table view. |
Consider the following:
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To remove the filter selections, click the Edit Widget button and then click Remove filter selections. To delete all the dimensions that you added, click Delete all dimensions. Hover over the button icon to view the button name. |
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To delete a specific dimension, click the Delete <Dimension Name> button next to the dimension name that you added. Hover over the button icon to view the button name. |
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Select the Group By dimensions (for example, Cloud Vendor, Cloud Vendor Account Name, Service). |
Note:To add additional Group By dimensions, click the plus sign (+) next to Group By and select a Group By dimension. You can add up to 10 dimensions.
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Select the date filter as Daily and choose the desired date range and then click Apply. |
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Click View Anomalies to analyze the cost anomalies. The Cloud Cost Anomalies page appears, displaying the rows with the most interesting changes. |
Viewing Cost Anomalies
The previous section, How to Find Anomalies in Your Cloud Spend, provides procedures for how to navigate to a view of cost anomalies. This section provides more details about viewing anomalies.
Each anomaly graph represents one interesting row of data from the Dashboard Table View or Tabular View based on the filters applied. The rows with the largest volume of costs outside of the expected range are sorted to the top. The following graph shows an example cost anomaly.
Note the following:
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The Cloud Cost Anomalies page is a view-only page. |
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The red points show where an anomaly occurred in the spend. |
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The table below the graph shows the dimension values for this row from the Dashboard Table View or Tabular View. |
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To drill into more detail, you might go back to the Dashboard Table View or Tabular View and add another dimension or select another dimension value in the Filter section, and then click the View Anomalies button again. |
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To drill into more detail, you might go back to the Dashboard Table View or Tabular View and add another Group By dimension such as Resource Type or Instance Type, and then click the View Anomalies button again. |
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To share the cost anomalies, click the copy icon (sideways “V”) next to the Cloud Cost Anomalies page name. The link is copied to your clipboard and you can now paste it into an email, a text message, or anywhere else where you would like to paste the link. |
You can also load the Cloud Cost Analyzer dashboard and then add filters to focus on the dimension values specified under the anomaly graph. Then, you can add more Group By dimensions to explore further details.
Note:To load the Cloud Cost Analyzer dashboard, go to Dashboards > Cloud, and click the dashboard name and select Cloud Cost Analyzer.
How Cost Anomalies are Detected
For each row in the tabular view, we'll look for anomalous data points using Bollinger Bands.
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We'll first calculate the moving average line using a window size of 10 samples. |
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Then we'll plot bands above and below that moving average, at a distance of 2 times the standard deviation of the points in the window. |
Any points outside of those bands will be considered anomalous.
Then we'll sort the flagged rows by the volume of costs outside of the Bollinger Bands.
Investigating Anomalies
Each anomaly graph represents one interesting row of data from the Dashboard Table View or Tabular View.
The graph shows the cost data over the 30 days, along with the calculated moving average and the upper and lower limits of the Bollinger Bands. You can hover over the graph to see the values for specific points.
To further research the anomaly in Cloud Cost Optimization, you can load the Cloud Cost Analyzer dashboard and add filters for the dimension values specified under the anomaly graph.
Note:To load the Cloud Cost Analyzer dashboard, go to Dashboards > Cloud, and click the dashboard name and select Cloud Cost Analyzer.
Cloud Cost Anomaly Alerts
The Cloud Cost Anomaly Alerts policy can be employed to send out notifications when anomalies are detected in your cloud spend. The policy allows you to specify the desired dimensions for cost grouping, set a minimum daily spend, define Bollinger Bands settings, and more.
For more information about generating alerts with the Cloud Cost Anomaly Alerts policy, see Cloud Cost Anomaly Alerts.