Scheduled Reports

The Scheduled Report Policy increases cost visibility and management in your multi-cloud world and helps you to take appropriate actions to run an efficient infrastructure. The benefits of this cost policy allow you to:

• Identify where you are wasting spend and realize immediate savings
• Collaborate to reduce future cloud costs
• Use tagging as a foundation for ongoing cost management
• Automate waste prevention

This policy allows you to set up scheduled reports that will provide summaries of cloud cost across all resources in the billing centers you specify, delivered to any email addresses you specify.

Complete the instructions below to apply the Scheduled Report Policy.

To apply the Scheduled Report Policy:

1. Navigate to Automation > Catalog.
2. Find the Scheduled Report policy in the Automation Catalog.
3. Click Apply and complete the following policy fields. Refer to the table below for details.

Policy Field

Action to Take

Policy Name

No action is needed.

Policy Description

No action is needed. This field contains a short description of the policy with links to more information about the policy.

Policy Schedule

Select the desired cadence of your emailed reports. The report cadence is relative to the initial launch of the policy. By choosing when to run the policy, you can control the day of the week and time of day when the reports will go out.

Note:There is a delay of 2-3 days before cloud vendors release cost data. Therefore, the most recent days will always be incomplete.

Test Mode

This is a reporting-only policy. The only action taken by the policy is to send the email notification. Changing the toggle will have no effect.

Select Accounts

The dropdown list contains accounts you have been granted access to run policies in. The account in which this policy runs does not determine the costs that will be reported in the email notification. You will determine which billing centers to report on in a later step.

Best Practice:We recommend running policies in the master account.

Email List

Includes your email by default. You can also add any other email addresses you would like to notify (including non-Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization users).

Billing Center List

Enter the name(s) of the top-level or lower-level billing center(s) you want to report costs from. This field, rather than the Select Accounts field above, is where you determine the costs you will see in your report. Leave this field blank to report on all costs (all top-level billing centers). The name(s) you enter must be exact matches for the name(s) of the corresponding billing center(s) in Cloud Cost Optimization.

Cost Metric

Make your selection from the following:

• Amortized - One-time costs such as upfront Reserved Instance (RI) fees are spread across the lifespan of the resources in question.
• Unamortized - One-time costs appear in full at the time they were incurred.

Graph Dimension

Select which dimension you would like to see broken out on the graph in the report. These are the same default dimensions available in The “Default” Dashboards.
4. Click Apply to apply the Scheduled Report policy.

To interpret the emailed Scheduled Report:

1. Once you have applied the scheduled report policy, you should receive email reports per the cadence you specified. The email headings will appear as follows:
“_[Account name]_ *(Org ID:* _[#]_ *): Full Cost Scheduled Report*” 
2. The email includes a Spending Overview Chart image. The bar chart displays the last 6 months of spend broken down by the Graph Dimension you selected when launching the policy (such as Category or Service, for example). Depending on your email client, you may need to allow images to display before you can see the Spending Overview Chart.
3. Beneath the Spending Overview Chart is the cost breakdown in a table format. The amounts shown are in the same currency as your Cloud Cost Optimization bill data.
• Daily Average column gives you the average per-day cost across the last week and last month.
• Previous gives you the total cost across the previous full week and previous full month.
• Current (incomplete) gives you the total cost so far during this week and this month. Remember that the last few days of data will always be incomplete due to vendor delay in releasing bill data.
4. If you wish to terminate the policy or check its status or configuration, click the blue View Details button to return to the Applied Policies interface.
5. In the Actions column of the Applied Policies interface, click the ellipses (...) to select the appropriate policy action (Terminate, Apply Similar, Run Now, View Log).