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A financial commitment is an agreement made with a cloud provider to spend a certain amount of money over a designated timeframe (e.g., one or three years) in return for a discounted rate on services. Examples of financial commitments include AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, Azure Reservations and Savings Plans, and Google Cloud committed use discounts (CUDs). Other discounts include the AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) and Spot Instances. Vantage financial commitment reports provide a unified view of your AWS, Azure, and GCP financial commitments, with the ability to filter or create custom aggregations and groupings. You can report on a single provider or combine providers in one report. Financial commitment reports track Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, committed use discounts, Spot Instance usage, and EDP discounts.
You can review your commitment inventory on the Commitments page before you build a report.
  • Azure: Reservations and Savings Plans appear after you complete the Optional Azure Reservations and Savings Plans steps. This applies to non-CSP billing accounts (Pay-As-You-Go, MCA, or EA). These steps do not apply to Azure CSP integrations. Financial Commitment Reports use the cost integration only and do not require these extra permissions.
  • GCP: Spend-based committed use discounts are listed on the Commitments page. Resource-based CUDs are included in Financial Commitment Reports and are not listed in that inventory.

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Provider Coverage

Reports use the same commitment type and charge type labels for every provider. See the sections below for how each provider’s discounts appear in the report, and what is required to include that provider.

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AWS

An AWS integration with Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) enabled is required. Reports become available after the first CUR file has been delivered to and ingested from the S3 bucket Vantage reads from. If you see “Data is Processing”, Vantage is still waiting for that first successful CUR import. For backfilling past months, see Backfilling AWS CUR for previous reporting periods. AWS reports include Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot Instance usage, and Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) discounts, along with On-Demand usage. Savings Plan coverage appears as Savings Plan Discounted Spend. Reserved Instance coverage appears as Reserved Instance Discounted Spend. Spot usage appears as Spot Usage.

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Azure

An Azure integration for a non-CSP account is required. Supported account types include Standard (Pay-As-You-Go), Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), and Enterprise Agreement (EA). Azure CSP is not supported. No permissions beyond the connected cost integration are required. Azure reports include Reservations, Savings Plans, Spot VM usage, On-Demand usage, credits, and refunds.
  • Reservation-covered usage appears as Reserved Instance Discounted Spend. Unused reservation charges appear as Unused Reservation.
  • Savings Plan-covered usage appears as Savings Plan Discounted Spend. Unused Savings Plan charges appear as Unused Savings Plan.
  • Spot VM usage appears as Spot Usage. Spot is excluded from the coverage calculation.
  • Uncovered usage appears as On-Demand, with a charge type of Usage.
  • Credits and refunds appear as Credit and Refund.
Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACCs) are not included in Financial Commitment Reports.

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GCP

A GCP integration that uses the detailed billing export is required. Detailed export is already required to connect GCP. No additional permissions are required. GCP reports include committed use discounts and the On-Demand usage in categories those discounts can cover.
  • Spend-based and other flexible CUDs appear as a Savings Plan, with covered usage shown as Savings Plan Discounted Spend.
  • Resource-based CUDs appear as a Reserved Instance, with covered usage shown as Reserved Instance Discounted Spend, when the consumption model description or credit name indicates a resource-based commitment.
  • Unused CUD fee charges appear as Unused Savings Plan.
  • Usage that is not covered by a CUD appears as On-Demand, with a charge type of Usage.
Sustained use discounts and promotional credits are not included in Financial Commitment Reports. Those costs remain available in Cost Reports.

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Understand Discounted Coverage and Effective Savings Rate

Financial commitment reports in Vantage help you understand your overall discounted coverage and effective savings rate. The same calculations apply to AWS, Azure, and GCP. These metrics are described in detail below.

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Coverage

Coverage is the percentage of On-Demand usage offset by financial commitments, such as Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and committed use discounts. Coverage can be calculated as: Covered UseCovered Use+On–Demand Use\frac{Covered\ Use}{Covered\ Use+On–Demand\ Use} Here, Covered Use refers to the gross On-Demand equivalent of usage covered by commitments (i.e., what that usage would have cost at On-Demand rates without discounts). On-Demand Use reflects actual On-Demand spend included by the report’s On-Demand Costs option. With All Costs, On-Demand usage that commitments can’t cover is included, which can lower coverage.
Spot usage is excluded from this calculation as it is not eligible for committed usage discounts.
As a basic example, an app uses two Reserved Instances. The app also uses three On-Demand instances of the same size.
  • The two Reserved Instances cover $120 in gross On-Demand equivalent usage.
  • The three On-Demand instances account for $180 in gross On-Demand usage.
$120$120+$180=40% coverage\frac{\$120}{\$120+\$180} = 40\%\ coverage With this lower coverage percentage, the app’s developers could consider purchasing more Reserved Instances, instead of On-Demand instances, and realize greater savings.

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Effective Savings Rate

Effective savings rate measures the impact of purchased financial commitments as well as discounts, refunds, and credits. If you use financial commitments with higher discounts, you’ll improve your effective savings rate. The effective savings rate can be calculated as follows. 1−Discounted SpendOn–Demand Equivalent Spend1 - \frac{Discounted\ Spend}{On–Demand\ Equivalent\ Spend} As an example, an app uses a large-sized Reserved Instance, with a one-year no upfront commitment. It costs $0.20 per hour. The app used the Reserved Instance for 90% of the month (i.e., 657 hours, when using a value of 730 hours for the month).
  • The Reserved Instance costs a total of $146 for this month ($0.20 x 730 hours).
  • The On-Demand equivalent of this instance costs a total of $164.25 for the month ($0.25 per hour x 657 hours).
1−$146$164.25=11.11% effective savings1- \frac{\$146}{\$164.25} = 11.11\%\ effective\ savings

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Create a Financial Commitment Report

Before you create a report, you can view a list of active and expired Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and spend-based committed use discounts on the Commitments screen.
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Navigate to the Financial Commitment Reports screen. All existing reports are displayed. From this screen, you can edit and delete existing reports.
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To create a new report, click New Report.
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To filter costs, click the Filters button on the top left of the graph.
  • A costs where… tile is displayed for each provider in the filter, such as AWS costs where…, Azure costs where…, or GCP costs where…. Click + New Rule.
  • For Category, select an available filter category.
    You can filter by provider, service, account, billing account, commitment type, commitment ARN, charge type, category, subcategory, instance type, region, and tag. The provider-specific filters and example values are shown below.
    If you want to see the discount impact of a single Savings Plan, Reserved Instance, or committed use discount, use the Commitment ARN filter. The control uses that label for every provider.
  • Two additional dropdown menus are displayed. Select is, is not, contains, or does not contain based on your desired filter criteria, then select one or more corresponding values from the second dropdown menu. For Tag, the Tag Key dropdown is displayed before the operator dropdown.
  • Click Save.
GIF of filtering a commitment report for AWS category costs that are not usage
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You can optionally edit your existing rules or add additional filter criteria.
  • To edit the rule you just created, select the rule, make your changes, and then click Save.
  • If you want to add a rule to filter multiple criteria, such as filter by certain services and another rule to filter by certain regions, click + New Rule. Add the additional criteria and save.
  • To add a separate rule set, click + New Filter. This rule set will be displayed as Or AWS costs where…, Or Azure costs where…, or Or GCP costs where… in a new rule section, matching the provider on that filter.
  • To delete a rule set, click the trashcan icon on the top right of the rule set.
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Above the rule set(s), click Apply. The graph will update with your existing filter criteria.
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To save the report, click Save as New. Enter a report name, and click Save. (To edit this name, click the pencil icon in the breadcrumbs above the chart, next to the report’s name.)
You can edit the filter criteria on a report at any time. Remember to click Save once you are done making changes.

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Apply Aggregations to Reports

You have the option to further drill down into your costs:
  • Above the graph, click the Group By dropdown menu. Select one or more grouping options. You can group by provider, charge type, commitment type, commitment ARN, service, account, billing account, region, category, subcategory, instance type, and tag.
    Filtering a commitment report for AWS category costs that are not usage
    For a detailed breakdown of the Charge Type grouping, see the Cost Reports documentation. Azure and GCP reuse these charge type labels. See Provider Coverage for how each commitment maps to a label.
  • To adjust the date binning, click the data bin menu on the top right of the graph. Select either Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. Hourly granularity is available for AWS as an opt-in feature. See the section below for details.
  • To change the date range, click the date menu on the top right of the graph and adjust the date range.
    You can historically view back as far as your account’s retention period. By default, this period is six months. Azure and GCP history is limited to billing periods that have already been imported. See Provider Coverage.

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Hourly Reporting

Hourly granularity is available for AWS only. Azure and GCP reports use daily granularity. To enable hourly reporting for AWS, contact support@vantage.sh.
With hourly granularity, you can analyze your financial commitment coverage and utilization, by the hour, for any 14-day period within your data retention. Once this feature is enabled in your account, you may need to update your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) settings. If your CUR is currently set to daily aggregation (the Vantage default), you must reconnect your AWS integration with a new CUR configured to use an hourly time unit. You can check the time unit of your existing CUR in one of two ways:
  • Navigate to the AWS integration settings page and look at the Cost Aggregation column next to your AWS integration.
  • Navigate to the Services Active Resources page.
    • Select CUR Report Definitions.
    • Select a listed report.
    • Under the metadata box on the right, check the Time Unit field.
From the date bin dropdown menu, select Hourly. The X-axis of the chart displays both days and hours for the report you are viewing. When you switch to hourly binning, you will automatically be switched to a 14-day period with the same end date as the date period you are currently viewing.
If you’re viewing costs at an hourly granularity and select a date range longer than 14 days, Vantage will display a warning that your view will switch to daily granularity.
A view of a full financial commitment report

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Commitment Eligibility Filter

You can also adjust which On-Demand costs are included in the report. Click On-Demand Costs: and select one of the following options. New reports open on Commitment-Eligible Costs. A saved report keeps the option it was saved with.
  • All Costs: Display costs that are included in the financial commitment dataset. Marketplace purchases are excluded for AWS, Azure, and GCP. For AWS, tax and free tier usage are also excluded, and all other AWS services are included. Azure includes credits and refunds. For GCP, only usage in commitment-eligible categories is loaded, so this view does not include the rest of your GCP bill.
  • Commitment-Eligible Costs: Limit On-Demand usage to categories that can be covered by Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, or committed use discounts. Covered usage remains in the report. For AWS, this option includes the following services:
    • Amazon EC2
    • AWS Lambda
    • Amazon SageMaker
    • Amazon RDS
    • Amazon Aurora
    • Amazon DynamoDB
    • Amazon ElastiCache
    • Amazon DocumentDB
    • Amazon Neptune
    • Amazon OpenSearch
    • Amazon EKS
    • Amazon ECS
For Azure and GCP, eligible categories come from usage that is already covered by a Reservation, Savings Plan, or committed use discount. GCP usage outside those categories is not included in the report.

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Review the Report

By default, financial commitment reports are grouped by Charge Type (e.g., Savings Plan Discounted Spend, Spot Usage). Groupings are represented by each colored section of the bar chart. Hover over any bar to get a breakdown of costs. The breakdown is also provided in the table below the chart.
Costs in the graph are unblended.
You can sort the table by any of the date or grouping columns. The chart contains two axes: the left axis measures costs, and the right axis measures the coverage and effective savings rate. The cost axis shows positive and negative values (i.e., discounts are represented as negative dollar values).
A view of a full financial commitment report
Trend lines are displayed to illustrate the change in coverage and effective savings rate over time. Hover over any line to get a point-in-time view of each metric and associated costs. Above the chart, the following values are displayed for the report’s lookback period:
  • Total Savings: The total amount saved by using your financial commitments and other discounts.
  • Effective Savings Rate: The percentage discount across all usage. (See the section above for a more in-depth explanation of this metric.)
  • Coverage: The percentage of total spending that is covered by financial commitments. (See the section above for a more in-depth explanation of this metric.)

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Export the Report

You can export a Financial Commitment Report’s table to CSV from the report page. Vantage generates the file and emails it to the recipients you select, the same way Cost Report exports are delivered.

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Add a Financial Commitment Report to a Dashboard

You can add financial commitment reports to a dashboard so that teams can see the coverage related to their resources. See the Dashboards documentation for more information on how to create and add reports to dashboards. To show a single number instead of the chart, add the report as a KPI widget and choose Total Savings, Coverage, or ESR.