Introduction

ITS Cloud Services has contracted with CloudCheckr to provide services for monitoring and alerting related to expenditures with cloud accounts and providers.  This software platform provides general spending trends, historical billing information, and allows end users to set alerts based on cost changes.  Additionally, ITS Cloud Services will be using this service to consolidate efforts for chargebacks to departmental MFKs for their cloud usage.  If you browse the online help from CloudCheckr, you may see references to features that you are unable to utilize.  Be aware that the features that ITS Cloud Services has exposed from the CloudCheckr platform are a subset of the overall capability available, to help minimize end user confusion and control costs.  In the future, we may consider enabling additional features if costs and user demand make sense.

Logging in to the service

To log in to the CloudCheckr service, visit this link, and log in using your HawkID:  https://login.cloud.uiowa.edu/billing

NOTES:

• Logins to CloudCheckr are federated through our local Shibboleth identity provider so that you can use your HawkID to log in.  If you try to log in directly to the CloudCheckr website without going through        the login link above, it will fail.
• Access to log in to this service is restricted, and managed by ITS Cloud Services.  If you are unable to log in, have the cloud account contact reach out to ITS Cloud Services to request access for your HawkID.

Basic Help

After you have logged in to the service, you will default to a page with a list of the AWS accounts you have access to.  If you also (or instead) have access to Azure accounts, you can see those by clicking the "Azure" tab at the top.  Clicking on the hotlink for the account will take you into the reporting interface for that account.

Viewing Cost Information

On the left side, under the Cost menu, choose AWS Billing (or Azure Billing), and view the Dashboard for a summary.  You can also view historical data under the Summary Reports section.

This platform offers a great deal of flexibility for creating advanced grouping and reporting filters, and saving those options for use in future reports.  Read CloudCheckr's documentation on this feature for further information.

Setting Alerts

Using CloudCheckr, you are able to set alerts to be sent to your email address upon triggering by certain conditions.  Examples might include exceeding a budget threshold, a change in spend of a significant percentage, or excessive network utilization.  To set your own custom alerts, on the left hand menu, click Cost, then Alerts, and go to Manager.  From there, you will see various options for setting your custom alert.

You can read more about setting alerts at CloudCheckr's support site. 

Common Reports

There is a page within the CloudCheckr navigation that contains shortcuts to several common searches.  You can access this under the navigation menu by selecting Cost | AWS Billing | Custom Reporting | Common Searches

Further Information

Additional support for this product is available at https://success.cloudcheckr.com/.  Please reach out to ITS Cloud Services with any additional questions you may have.