Recommendations

What are PyraCloud Recommendations?

The Recommendations module in PyraCloud is a set of functionalities that facilitate intelligent recommendations and suggestions to optimize, streamline and improve your software environment, be that on-premise or the cloud.

The Recommendations module offers recommendations from a variety of sources for e.g. Azure Advisor, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Trusted Advisor as well as integrating with SoftwareONE Services to provide bespoke and tailored recommendations that optimise a customer’s software environment.

Additionally, the Recommendation module provides capabilities to track metrics such as realised savings and completed recommendations for example, so these can be further used to track, manage and report on savings opportunities and other key success metrics as well as justify return on investment.

How to Access Recommendations

You can access Recommendations a couple of ways:

Through Dashboards – The Recommendations tile is available as part of both the ‘Software Asset Management’ and ‘Cloud’ dashboard templates. The tiles on these dashboards will navigate you to the appropriate section within the Recommendations module.

For example, clicking on the SLM Recommendations tile in the Software Asset Management Dashboard will navigate you to the Software Lifecycle Management Saving Recommendations.

In the Cloud Dashboard, clicking on the Azure Recommendations tile will navigate you to the Azure Saving Recommendations and clicking on AWS Recommendations tile will navigate you to the AWS Saving Recommendations within the Recommendations module.

Below is an example of the SLM Recommendations tile under the Software Asset Management dashboard template:

Below are examples of Azure and AWS Recommendation tiles in the Cloud dashboard template:

Through the Menu Item – In the main PyraCloud navigation menu, click on Analyze and then select Recommendations as shown below:

SLM Dashboard Recommendations Tile

The Software Asset Management Dashboard includes the SLM Recommendations tile as part of the template.

Cloud Dashboard Recommendations Tiles

The Cloud dashboard includes the Azure and AWS Recommendations Tiles as part of the pre-defined template.

Overview Page

The Recommendations module comes equipped with multiple views to help you understand and visualize recommendations in various ways. The Overview page is an analytics-based view that helps you understand how recommendations are associated with various parts of your infrastructure and how they are tracked i.e. potential or completed.

All customer recommendations are divided into three areas:

• Cost Optimization
• Operational Excellence
• Security

Tiles on the Overview page enable you to understand how recommendations are distributed across different areas, and how advanced you are in implementing them. Additionally, below each tile, you can find information about the most impactful recommendation type.

As mentioned previously, the Recommendation module presents data from different sources. This information is presented in the grid below the tiles. This view helps you to understand where your biggest opportunities to improve are.

Cost Optimization

The Cost Optimization page enables you to understand the potential savings structure. On the grid, you can find information about realized and active saving recommendations.

At the top of the page, there are filters that allow you to filter recommendations. All charts are adjusted for provided search criteria.

You can find more details for each recommendation type by clicking on it. This will open up more information about Potential and Realized saving.

Operational Excellence

The Operational Excellence page enables you to understand the Operational Excellence recommendations structure. On the grid, you can find information about realized and active Operational Excellence recommendations. At the top of the page, there are filters that allow you to filter recommendations. All charts are adjusted for provided search criteria.

You can find more details for the Operational Excellence recommendation type by clicking on it.

Security

The Security page enables you to understand the Security recommendations structure. On the grid, you can find information about realized and active Security recommendations. At the top of the page, there are filters that allow users to filter recommendations. All charts are adjusted for provided search criteria.

You can find more details for the Security recommendation type by clicking on it.

Recommendation Features

The Recommendations module provides recommendations for on-premise and cloud environments. All recommendations come with a set of capabilities offered as part of the Recommendations platform. Some of these are:

• Ability to collaborate with your peers and SoftwareONE services through messaging and mentions.
• Ability to track progress of every recommendation along with notes at every stage of the recommendation.

Let us look at these features in more detail below.

Messaging

You can collaborate on recommendations by using the messaging features. Simply click on a Recommendation from the grid and then navigating to the Messages tab.

The messaging feature allows stakeholders to participate in a conversation, so multiple collaborators can keep on top of recommendations and their progress. Through the use of the ‘mentions’ feature, users can tag their peers or SoftwareONE Services Consultants to bring items, to-do lists or issues to their attention.

This is available by typing ‘@’ and then typing the user’s first/last name, and selecting their name from the dropdown as show below. When a user is mentioned in a conversation, then an email is sent to the mentioned user as a notification. These email notifications cannot be turned off.

Progress Log

Every recommendation can be tracked through its lifecycle with the progress log functionality. You can track progress by navigating to the progress log.

Marking a Recommendation as Complete

All recommendations can be marked as complete from the Recommendation Type page when completed. There is an option to complete one or all recommendations of the given type.

Note: for Azure and AWS recommendations, you don’t need to Mark recommendations as Complete, as the Recommendations system automatically detects when recommendations are being executed and moves them to the completed/realized state. However, there are some exceptions to automatically realizing savings amounts from Azure and AWS Recommendations. Please see section Completion of Azure Recommendations or Completion of AWS Recommendations.

Once a recommendation has been completed, it is moved from the Active tab on the main page to the Realised tab, and the realised.

Dismissing a Recommendation

If a recommendation is not planned to be actioned on, you can dismiss the recommendation from the Recommendation type page. There is an option to dismiss all recommendations of the given type.

SLM Recommendations

Software Lifecycle Management (SLM) Recommendations are recommendations that are categorised under the following Categories:

• Savings – These recommendations when actioned can enable cost savings.
• Risk – These recommendations help mitigate compliance risk for licenses that seem to come from a non-compliance position.

Azure Recommendations

Azure Recommendations are recommendations that are categorised under the following Categories:

• Savings – These recommendations when actioned can enable cost savings.
• Risk – These recommendations help mitigate compliance risk for licenses that seem to come from a non-compliance position.
• Security – These recommendaitons help to improve security of the Azure enviroenment
• High Availability – These recommendaitons help to improve hight availabilty of the Azure enviroenment
• Performance – These recommendations help improve perfoemance of the Azure environment

All Azure Recommendations have a Cloud Recommendation Type. For recommendations recommended by Azure, some examples of recommendation types are:

• Buy Reserved Instances
• Shutdown or Resize your Virtual Machine
• Security Center Recommendations
• Enable Soft Delete
• Enable Backup etc.

Associating Recommendations with Resources

All Azure recommendations that have been recommended by ‘Azure’ (and not by SoftwareONE services), are automatically associated with resources whether they are virtual machines, storage accounts, databases etc.

For e.g. Recommendations of type ‘SQL DB Advisor recommendations’ are associated with SQL databases that need to be acted on.

The association from a recommendation to a related PyraCloud resource is available in the Related Resources tab on the Recommendation Details page.

Completion of Azure Recommendations

PyraCloud can detect the completion of Recommendations in Microsoft Azure. When a recommendation is detected as being completed on Azure, the status on that recommendation will automatically be set to Completed, and the potential savings amount on the recommendations will be set to Realised. When this happens, the recommendation will be moved from the Active tab to the Realised tab, and the realised savings from the recommendation will start to reflect on the Savings tile on the Azure tab.

PyraCloud does not track realization of Reserved Instance recommendations from Microsoft Azure. This means when recommendations of the type ‘Buy Reserved Instances’ or ‘Renew Reserved Instances’ are completed i.e. PyraCloud will not track any savings realized as part of completing these recommendations.

AWS Recommendations

Note: PyraCloud downloads Recommendations for AWS from two AWS sources:

1. AWS Trusted Advisor and
2. AWS Cost Explorer.

Please see Section AWS Recommendation Sync Sources below for further information on these sources.

The AWS tab displays six tiles at the top. These are:

AWS Recommendations are recommendations that are categorized under the following Categories:

• Savings – These recommendations, when actioned, can enable cost savings.
• Security – These recommendations help to improve security of the Azure environment
• High Availability – These recommendations help to improve high availability of the Azure environment
• Performance – These recommendations help improve performance of the Azure environment

AWS Recommendation Sync Sources

There are two recommendation sources within AWS that PyraCloud pulls recommendation data from. These are AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer.

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor is a source for recommendation data within AWS, that is available for any environment that is configured with the correct AWS Support Plan i.e. Business or Enterprise. AWS Trusted Advisor provides information for various recommendation categories for e.g. Savings, Security, Performance, High Availability, Service Limits etc.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a source for recommendation data within AWS, that is available to any environment that has Cost Explorer turned on within AWS. PyraCloud is able to fetch Reservation-based recommendations from the Cost Explorer if Cost Explorer is enabled within AWS. These reservation-based recommendations are Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations that could help you reduce your costs.

Recommendations can be fetched from the AWS Cost Explorer if:

Cost Explorer is enabled within AWS. Please see here for enabling Cost Explorer within AWS.

AND

Cost Explorer is enabled for your AWS Account within Cloud Tenant Setup in PyraCloud. This is enabled by default.

By default, all your AWS accounts will be configured to pull recommendations from AWS Cost Explorer.

Synchronization Schedule
The synchronization with AWS Cost Explorer happens once a week (as opposed to all recommendations-related synchronization processes that run once an hour), and this schedule is not configurable at the moment. This is so we are able to minimize costs, as fetching data from Cost Explorer is chargeable.

Charges for synchronizing AWS Cost Explorer Recommendations
Please be aware that AWS charge 0.05 USD per account for every sync. PyraCloud will sync recommendation data per account once a week. When Cost Explorer is turned on (within AWS and PyraCloud), this should be a maximum of 0.20 USD per AWS account per month.

If you want to turn off these recommendations, please read section – How do I turn off Cost Explorer Recommendations?

In order to effectively utilize these recommendations, please make sure AWS Cost Explorer is turned on within AWS for each of your accounts. Please read this article to turn on Cost Explorer within AWS.

Please read the below section Troubleshooting Synchronization with AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer, for detailed instructions on how to troubleshoot/configure.

How do I turn off Cost Explorer Recommendations?

Cost Explorer recommendations provide reserved instance purchase recommendations for Amazon EC2, Redshift, RDS etc. Turning off these recommendations will mean that you do not have access to these savings-based recommendations. In order to turn off Cost Explorer, this needs to be done at an AWS account level. There is no option to turn Cost Explorer for all AWS accounts in one go.

Please see this article to turn off AWS Cost Explorer Recommendations for your AWS accounts.

Troubleshooting Synchronization with AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer

These are the scenarios you could encounter when you access AWS Recommendations:

1. AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer both show a green tick on the overview Page

• It measn that for all AWS accounts we are able to downlaod recommendations from AWS Trusted Advisor
• It measn that for all AWS accounts we are able to downloda recommendations from AWS Cost Explorer

2. AWS Trusted Advisor or Cost Explorer is not correctly configured for at least one AWS account.

When for at least one AWS account, PyraCloud is not able to download recommendations then information about it is reflected in the health check for AWS accounts on the main page.

By clicking on “Fix”, users are redirected to a page with problems details.

Possible issues

• Cannot read recommendations from AWS Trusted Advisor

This means that PyraCloud doesn’t have the right permission to pull data from AWS Trusted Advisor.

• Cannot read recommendations from AWS Cost Explorer

This means that PyraCloud doesn’t have the right permission to pull data from AWS Cost Explorer

• Cannot read recommendations from AWS Trusted Advisor due to support plan

This means that AWS account has to low support to download data through API for Trusted Advisor

• AWS Cost Explorer disabled in PyraCloud

This means that synchronization of recommendations from AWS Cost Explorer is not enabled within PyraCloud

• AWS Cost Explorer disabled in AWS

This means that AWS Cost Explorer was not enabled within the AWS account.

Office 365 Recommendations

Office 365 recommendations are recommendations from SoftwareONE that you can take advantage of. These recommendations will be populated by your SoftwareONE Services Account team, so you can make the best use of your Office 365 environment.

Recommendation Types for Office 365 Recommendations

All Office 365 Recommendations have a Cloud Recommendation Type. Some examples of recommendation types are:

• License Cleanup & Reconciliation (Category – Savings)
• Shared Mailbox Size – Mailbox approaching 50GB (Category – Savings)
• SecureScore Recommendation – Device (Category – Security)
• SecureScore Recommendation – Apps (Category – Security)
• SecureScore Recommendation – Identity (Category – Security)
• SecureScore Recommendation – Data (Category – Security)
• Email Forwarding (Category – Security)
• Empty Groups (Category – Infrastructure Hygiene)
• Inactive Distribution Groups (Category – Infrastructure Hygiene)
• Inactive Mail Recipients (Category – Infrastructure Hygiene)
• Email Archive (Category – Infrastructure Hygiene)

Advanced Filters for Office 365 Recommendations

Office 365 Recommendations can be filtered by a set of advanced criteria like:

• Category – Possible options are Savings, Security, Infrastructure Hygiene, New Feature/Update and Other
• Provider – Possible options are Software Asset Management, Azure, AWS, Office 365
• Cloud Recommendation Type – as mentioned in section ‘Recommendation Type for Office 365 Recommendations’
• Severity – Possible options are High, Medium and Low Impact
• Subscription Name – This is the name of the subscription that the recommendation applies to
• Alert – These are alert status associated with the Recommendation such as Unread, Updated and Expires soon. Please see section ‘Unread, Updated and Expiring Recommendations’ above for more detail on these alert types
• Owner – This is the name of the person to whom the recommendation can be assigned. Recommendation can be assigned to a member of the SoftwareONE Consultant team working with the customer, or any user within the customer for better tracking and management of the recommendation