Server

Exivity can be installed on any Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 or higher server in your on premise data center or in the cloud. Depending on the amount of data, Exivity recommends the following system configuration:

Both the Data sources and CUPR in above tables are recommended limits. All systems should have a standard C: OS drive. The storage recommendation in the table above is for a D: drive, which preferably is SSD.

Client

The Exivity front-end runs fine in these desktop browsers (with at least the specified version):

• Google Chrome 63+

• Chromium 66+

• Microsoft Edge 41+ (EdgeHTML 16+)

• Opera 50+

• Mozilla Firefox 65+ (support added in Exivity v2.10.0)

We don't support Apple Safari at the moment due to missing features in this browser.

Exivity can be installed in your on-premises data center using the provided installer. You can automatically deploy it using the silent installation command line options or execute it as an interactive installer.

To install Exivity, you'll need the following:

1. A system that complies with the Exivity minimal system requirements

2. The Exivity software installation executable

3. A valid Exivity license key

If you need help meeting one or more of the above requirements, please get in contact with our support department.

Interactive installation

To install Exivity interactively, execute the provided setup executable. Then follow the instructions on screen:

• Provide a valid license key

• Pick a folder to install the Exivity program Files

• Pick a folder that Exivity will use to save its configuration, extraction and reporting files. This is called the Exivity home directory and it is recommended to use a local SSD volume which is not the boot drive.

• Provide the TCP port for the Exivity API (default: 8002)

• Provide the TCP port for the Exivity GUI (default: 8001)

• Choose an admin username and password

• As the installer completes you will be offered the option to start the Exivity services

Silent Installation

To execute a silent installation the following command line parameters are supported:

<setup>.exe /S /EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH=[path] /EXIVITY_HOME_PATH=[path] /ADMIN_USER=[user] /ADMIN_PASSWORD=[password]

EXAMPLE:

<setup>.exe /S /EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH="C:\Program Files\Exivity\program" /EXIVITY_HOME_PATH=D:\Exivity\home /ADMIN_USER=master /ADMIN_PASSWORD=P@ssword

Upgrading

Upgrading your installation of Exivity is straightforward and may be done by installing the new version over the top of the old.

Manually upgrade

Execute the setup executable. It will detect the installed version of Exivity, and will automatically upgrade when you click Next

Silent upgrade

When executing <setup>.exe /S, your existing installation will be automatically upgraded.

Installing a valid SSL certificate

Exivity comes as standard with an untrusted self-signed SSL certificate. It is therefore highly recommended to replace the default certificate with an official one, signed by your Certificate Authority. To install a signed certificate, follow this procedure:

1. Download the 32 bit version of openssl.exe from https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html, and install this tool on the Exivity server

2. Use the openssl.exe executable to generate a valid key file on the Exivity server by executing the following command:

   • C:\TEMP>c:\location\to\openssl.exe genrsa -out exivity.key 4096

3. Run the following command to create a certificate signing request file:

   • C:\TEMP>c:\location\to\openssl.exe req -new -key exivity.key -out exivity.csr

4. You will be asked to enter general information like company name, city, etc. However, it is important to include the FQDN of the Exivity server when asked for it:

• 'Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []'

1. The generated CSR file should be sent to your Certificate Authority. After processing by your CA, you shoud receive back a .crt file. Rename this file to exivity.crt and copy it, together with your exivity.key file, to the directory %EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH%\server\nginx\conf. This should overwrite the existing key and crt files

2. Restart the Exivity Web Service Windows service to activate your signed certificate.

Configuring a separate web server portal

In some environments it may be desirable to separate the webserver from the backend components. This can be achieved by installing two separate Exivity instances. One instance could be placed in a DMZ and the second instance would then typically be deployed within a local network as shown in the following diagram:

To achieve this, first install Exivity on both nodes using the standard procedure described here. After installing the Exivity software on the system that should become the User Portal, create the following file in the directory%EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH%/server/nginx/conf/sites-enabled:

server {
    listen                  443 http2 ssl;
    server_name             localhost;

    ssl_certificate         exivity.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key     exivity.key;

    error_page              497 301 =307 https://$host:$server_port$request_uri;

    root                    web/glass;
    index                   index.html;

    charset                 utf-8;

    location ~ /v[0-9]+?/ {
        proxy_pass          https://HOSTNAME_BACKEND_PORTAL:8002;
        proxy_buffering     off;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port 443;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass          https://127.0.0.1:8001;
        proxy_buffering     off;
    }

    access_log              logs/access-webproxy.log;
    error_log               logs/error-webproxy.log error;

    location = /favicon.ico {
        access_log          off;
        log_not_found       off;
    }
    location = /robots.txt  {
        access_log          off;
        log_not_found       off;
    }

    client_max_body_size    100m;
}

Make sure to replace HOSTNAME_BACKEND_PORTAL with the actual hostname or IP address of the system that serves as your Exivity Backend Portal.

The second item that requires configuration is the config.json in the %EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH%/web/glass directory on the User Portal:

{
  "whiteLabel": false,
  "apiHost": "https://HOSTNAME_USER_PORTAL"
}

Replace HOSTNAME_USER_PORTAL with the actual hostname or IP address of the system that serves as your Exivity User Portal. In case the User Portal should be accessible from the internet, you will need to ensure to provide the fully qualified domain name of the User Portal.

Once you have applied these changes, restart the Exivity Web Service . You should now be able to access your Exivity User Portal.

Using an Internet proxy when extracting data

In cases where Exivity instance requires internet connectivity (i.e. to obtain Azure or AWS consumption data), and your network infrastructure requires use of a proxy server, it is necessary to configure a system environment variable.

Right click on This PC in an Explorer Window and click on Properties:

Then go to Advanced System Settings, then click the Environment Variables button:

Now add a new System Variable with the name ALL_PROXY and fill in the address of your proxy server as the value for this variable:

In case you do not want to use the proxy for certain address or domains, it is also possible to add an additional variable NO_PROXY:

After confirming the change, make sure to restart both the Exivity Windows Services.

Increase limit of filesize upload in the API

By default, Exivity API has a limit of 2048kb for filesize uploading, should you require to increase it, please modify the file located in %EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH%\server\php\php.ini

Introduction

Exivity can be deployed from the AWS Market Place allowing you to have a functional Exivity solution in a matter of minutes. This tutorial will get you up and running.

AWS Marketplace Offering

Login to your AWS portal and access the Exivity offering here.

1. Click on Continue to Subscribe.

2. Read our Terms and Conditions, and when ready, click on Continue to Configuration.

3. Select the Region where you want to deploy Exivity and click on Continue to Launch.

4. In Choose Action select Launch though EC2 and click on Launch to access the Deployment Wizard.

Deployment Wizard

1. In the first screen, try to pick a recommended VM size type that has enough CPU's and Memory (see this page for general system requirements). When you are done with your selection click on Next: Configure Instance details.

1. In this section, you can select your VPC Configuration, or leave the default values.When you are done with your configuration click on Next: Add Storage.

2. In the Storage section, two drives are recommended, you can influence the Volume Type and the Size (GiB) parameters. When ready, click on Next: Add Tags.

3. In the Tags section, include the tags that are meaningful to you, as a minimum, a Name tag is recommended. Click on Next: Configure Security Group.

1. In the Security Group section, you can leave the default recommended security group or add more rules if needed. Click on Review and Launch.

2. Review the details and click on Launch, select your preferred Key Pair to connect to the instance.

In a few minutes your instance will be deployed, you can track the progress in your EC2 Dashboard:

Write down the Public IP address / Public DNS and the Instance ID once they are available.

Connecting to your Exivity instance

You can logon to your Exivity instance with RDP, but after deployment you should be able to connect to your instance using the public IP address or DNS name of your Exivity instance considering the following default URL:

• https://<Your_Public_DNS>:8001

The default admin username is admin with password Instance ID.

By default no data is loaded into the system, so you'll have to create a new Extractor for obtaining consumption data and a Transformer to process that data. A Report Definition is then created to be able to report on your consumption metrics and costs.

Next Steps

A couple of getting started guides are provided here, but feel free to drop us an e-mail or create a ticket in our support portal. We will then assist you to get your started for your specific use case

An introduction to Services

In Exivity Services can be anything that corresponds to a SKU or sellable item from your Service Catalogue. It should relate to a consumption record (or multiple records) from your extracted data sources.

For example: with most public cloud providers, the provider defines the chargeable items that are shown on the end of month invoice. However, when working through a Managed Services Provider, a Cloud Services Provider or a System Integrator, additional services can be sold on top of those. Potentially, you may want to apply an uplift to the rate or charge a fixed amount of money every month for a certain service. Different scenario's are possible here, it all depends on your business logic.

Terminology

A service is a named item with associated rates and/or costs used to calculate a charge that appears on a report, where rates represent revenue and costs represent overheads.

When discussing services and their related charges a number of terms are required. Exivity uses the following terminology in this regard:

Creating service definitions

If the task does not complete successfully then the service definitions cached in memory are discarded, the expectation being that the task will be re-run after the error condition that caused it to fail has been rectified and the services will be written to the global database at that time.

Types of charges

There are different types of charge that can be associated with a service. Collectively these influence the total charge(s) shown on the report and Exivity supports the following charge types as described in the Terminology table above:

• unit rate

• fixed price

• COGS rate

• fixed COGS

At least one of these charge types must be associated with a service definition. Multiple combinations of the charge types may also be used.

Once the resulting charge has been calculated based on the charge types, it may be further modified through the application of adjustments, proration and minimum commit (all of which are detailed later in this article).

Charge intervals

In order to calculate the charge(s) associated with usage of a service Exivity needs to know the period of time for which each payment is valid. For example a Virtual Machine may have a daily cost associated with it, in which case using it multiple times in a single day counts as a single unit of consumption whereas Network Bandwidth may be chargeable per Gigabyte and each gigagyte transferred is charged as it occurs.

The charge interval (also termed simply interval) for a service can be one of the following:

• individually - the charge for a service is applied every time a unit of the service is consumed, with no regard for a charging interval

• daily - the charge is applied once per day

• monthly - the charge is applied once per calendar month

Charge models

Monthly services may be charged in one of two ways:

Peak

For each day of the month, a 'candidate' charge is calculated using Quantity * Unit Rate . The monthly charge will reflect the day of the month which resulted in the highest charge.

In the event that multiple days share the same highest charge then that charge will be associated with the first of those days seen, unless a subsequent day in that set has a higher quantity, in which case the charge will be associated with that subsequent day.

Average

The average unit rate for those days where usage was seen in the month is calculated, and multiplied by the average quantity for each day in the month. When calculating the average quantity, any days for which there was no consumption are factored in as having a quantity of 0.

Minimum commit

The minimum commit is the minimum number of units of consumption that are charged every interval, or (in the case of services with an interval of individually) every time the service is used. If fewer units than the minimum commit are actually consumed then the service will be charged as if the minimum commit number of units had been used.

Proration

After the charge for usage of a monthly service has been determined, it may be prorated by modifying that charge based on the frequency of the usage.

This process will reduce the charge based on the number of days within the month that the service was used. For example if consumption of a service with a monthly charge interval was only seen for 15 days within a 30 day calendar month then the final charge will be 1/2 of the monthly charge.

Service definitions

A service definition comprises two categories of information:

1. The service - Metadata describing fixed attributes of the service such as its name, description, group, interval, proration and charge type(s)

2. The rate revision - Information detailing the charge type(s) associated with the service (the rate, fixed price, COGS rate and fixed COGS values) and additional information detailing the date(s) for which those values should be applied

The following tables summarise the data members that comprise each of these categories:

Service attributes

Rate revision attributes

The rate_col, fixed_price_col, cogs_col and fixed_cogs_col fields are used when the specific value to use is derived at report-time from the usage data, as opposed to explicitly being included in the rate revision itself.

A service may have any number of associated rate revisions so long as they have different effective_date or minimum commit values. This means that a service can have different charges applied depending on the date that the report is to be generated for, or depending on the specific values in the columns used by a report.

A service may use neither, either or both of rate and fixed_price, and neither or one of cogs and fixed_cogs. At least one of rate, fixed_price, cogs or fixed_cogs is required, but cogs and fixed_cogs may not both be used.

The graphical user interface of Exivity is a pure client-side application, which means it runs inside your web browser. It communicates with the Exivity to obtain data records, report data and general configuration. This means all functionality available in the GUI can also be accessed programmatically.

The interface allows you to do the following:

• Develop extractors

• Create transformer (ETL) tasks

• Configure report definitions

• Run graphical usage & costs reports

• Run textual usage & costs reports

• Manage users & roles

• General configuration

• White labeling

More features are added on a regular basis.

Pre-requisites

This tutorial assumes that you have CUR (Cost and Usage Report) set up in your AWS environment. In the event that this is not the case please follow the steps in before proceeding.

Please note that in order to deploy this solution the S3 bucket to which CUR reports are written must reside in one of the following AWS regions:

• Northern Virginia

• Ohio

• Oregon

• Mumbai

• Seoul

• Singapore

• Sydney

• Tokyo

• Frankfurt

• Ireland

• London

At this point in time, only the previous regions have all the necessary services deployed.

Introduction

This tutorial shows how to build a serverless solution for querying the AWS CUR Report using Exivity. This solution makes use of AWS serverless services such as Lambda and Athena, as well as other commonly used services such as S3, CloudFormation, and API Gateway. The following topics will be covered:

1. Solution Overview

2. Launching the CloudFormation Template

3. Creating the Lambda function and API Gateway

4. Configuring an Extractor

5. Configuring a Transformer

6. Creating your Report

Solution Overview

The Billing and Cost Management service writes your AWS Cost and Usage report to the S3 bucket that you designated when setting up the service. These files can be written on either an hourly or daily basis.

The CloudFormation template that accompanies this tutorial builds a Serverless environment containing a Lambda function which reads a CUR file, processes it and writes the resulting report to an output S3 bucket. The output data object has a prefix structure of "year=current-year" and "month=current-month". For example, if a file is written 13/09/2018 then the Lambda function outputs an object called "bucket-name/year=2018/month=09/file_name".

The next step in the template is to translate this processed report into Athena so that it can be queried. The following diagram shows the steps involved in the process:

Afterwards, we will create a Lambda function to query the Athena database, returning a URL with the results of the query in CSV format. We will also create an API EndPoint with the AWS API Gateway service, which is used by Exivity to retrieve the data.

Launching the CloudFormation template

In order to deploy this solution successfully the following information is required:

1. The name of your AWS Cost and Usage report.

2. The name of the S3 bucket in which the reports are currently stored.

Firstly, launch the CloudFormation template that builds all the serverless components that facilitate running queries against your billing data. When doing this, ensure that you choose the same AWS Region within which your CUR S3 bucket is located.

Now follow the instructions in the CloudFormation wizard, using the following options, and then choose Create.

• For CostnUsageReport, type the name of your AWS Cost and Usage report.

• For S3BucketName, type a unique name to be given to a new S3 bucket which will contain the processed reports.

• For s3CURBucket, type the name of the bucket into which your current reports are written.

While your stack is building, a page similar to the following is displayed.

When the Status column shows CREATE_COMPLETE, you have successfully created four new Lambda functions and an S3 bucket into which your transformed bills will be stored.

Once you have successfully built your CloudFormation stack, you can create a Lambda trigger that points to the new S3 bucket. This means that every time a new file is added to, or and existing file is modified in, the S3 bucket the action will trigger the lambda function.

Create this trigger using the following steps:

• Open the Lambda console.

• Choose Functions, and select the aws-cost-n-usage-main-lambda-fn-A Lambda function (note: do not click the check box beside it).

• There should be no existing triggers. Choose Trigger, Add trigger.

• For Trigger type (the box with dotted lines), choose S3.

• Select the S3 bucket withing which your CUR reports are stored.

• For Event type, choose Object Created (All) and check Enable trigger.

• Click Submit.

The database and table are not created until your function runs for the first time. Once this has been done, Athena will contain the database and table.

Athena stores query results in S3 automatically. Each query that you run has a results file in CSV format and a metadata file (*.csv.metadata) that includes header information such as column type, etc.

Testing (Optional)

Once you have successfully added the trigger to the S3 bucket in which the Billing and Cost Management services writes your CUR reports, test the configuration using the following steps.

• In the S3 path to which AWS writes your AWS Cost and Usage Billing reports, open the folder with your billing reports, open the folder with your billing reports. There will be either a set of folders or a single folder with a date range naming format.

• Open the folder with the data range for the current month. In this folder, there is a metadata file that can be found at the bottom of the folder. It has a JSON extension and holds the S3 key for the latest report.

• Download the metadata file. Ensure that the name of the file on your machine is the same as the version stored on your S3 bucket.

• Upload the metadata file to the same S3 path from which you downloaded it. This triggers the Lambda function aws-cost-n-usage-main-lmbda-fn-A.

• In the S3 bucket that you created to hold your processed files, choose the "year=" folder and then the "month=" folder that corresponds to the current month. You should see the transformed file there, with the time stamp that indicated that it was just written.

Creating the Lambda function and API Gateway

To automate this process a CloudFormation template will be provided. This template will create an IAM role and Policy in order that our API can invoke Lambda functions. Then it will create a Lambda function with the capabilities of querying our previously created Athena Serverless DB, and save the output in a S3 bucket in .csv format, (this output will be later retrieved by Exivity). Finally, it will deploy an API Gateway allowing us to create an endpoint for our Lambda function, this is the endpoint that the Exivity extractor will consume. Make sure to launch the CloudFormation template in the same region that you have deployed the previous one.

Let's start by downloading the CloudFormation template (you only need to choose one of the formats, both are supported by AWS):

Then follow the next steps:

• Go to the CloudFormation console.

• Choose Create Stack.

• Choose Upload a template to Amazon S3.

• Select from your computer the template that you have downloaded.

• Follow the CloudFormation wizard - Add a Name to the Stack and select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names in the last step.

• Once the stack is created you should see an CREATE_COMPLETE message.

• Click on Output to take a note of your endpoint (you will need to input this in the Exivity extractor).

Next, we will associate an API Gateway trigger to our Lambda function:

• Go to the Lambda console.

• Choose the QueryAthena2 function.

• Under Add Triggers select API gateway. You should see an image like the following:

• Click on API Gateway figure to configure it.

• On API select QueryAthena2.

• On Deployment Stage select v1.

• On Security select Open.

• Choose Add.

• Choose Save.

You should see a screen like this:

Finally, we will deploy the API Gateway:

• Go to the API Gateway console.

• Choose QueryAthena2.

• In the Resources section, click on the ANY method.

• In Actions, choose Delete Method.

• Click on Delete.

• In the Resources section, choose Actions.

• Click on Deploy API

• In Deployment Stage select V1.

• Add a Deployment Description.

• Choose Deploy.

Securing the API Gateway

Initially, the created API endpoint is public and as such is vulnerable to the possibility of misuse or denial-of-service attacks. To prevent this, associate an API Key with the endpoint as per the following steps:

• Inside the API Gateway dashboard, select the QueryAthena2 API

• In Resources, select Method Request

• In Settings, change API Key Required to True

• Click on Actions and choose Deploy API to effect the change

• In Deployment Stage, select v1 and click on Deploy

• Go to the API Keys section

• Click on Actions and select Create API Key

• In Name write ExivityAPIKey

• Click on Save

• Copy the API Key, as this will be required by the Exivity configuration

• Go to Usage Plan

• Click on Create.

• In Name write ExivityUsagePlan

• In the Throttling Section, change Rate to 100 and Burst to 10

• In the Quota Section, change it to 50000 requests per Month

• Click on Next

• Click on Add API Stage

• In API, select QueryAthena2 and in Stage select v1

• Confirm the changes and click on Next

• Click on Add API Key to Usage Plan

• Select ExivityAPIKey, confirm the changes

• Click on Done

The API Key is now required to access the API endpoint thus adding a layer of security to mitigate unauthorized access attempts.

Configure Extractor

To create the Extractor in Exivity, browse to Data Sources > Extractors and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. For AWS, please click AWS_CUR_Extractor from the list. Provide a name for the Extractor in the name field, and click the Create button.

Once you have created the Extractor, go to first tab: Variables

• In the Bucket variable specify the name of the S3 bucket where the .csv with the output of the query will be saved (The S3BucketName previously specified when launching the CloudFormation template).

• In the Api endpoint variable specify the API endpoint previously created plus the route /QueryAthena.

• In the DBname variable specify the name of your DB, you can find it in the Athena main Dashboard.

• In the Tablename variable specify the name of the table inside your DB, you can find it in the Athena main Dashboard.

• In the API_Key variable specify the API Key that we have created in the Securing API Gateway Section.

Once you have filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor for a single day:

The Extractor requires two parameters in yyyMMdd format:

• from_date is the date for which you wish to collect consumption data.

• to_date should be the date immediately following from_date.

These should be specified as shown in the screenshot above, separated with a space.

When you click the Run Now button, you should get a successful result.

Configure Transformer

Once you have successfully run your AWS CUR Extractor, you should be able to create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers and click the Create Transformer button. Select the AWS CUR Transformer and run it for a single day as a test. Make sure that it is the same day as for which you extracted consumption data in the previous step.

Create Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Report Definition via the menu Reports > Definitions:

Select the column(s) by which you would like to break down the costs. Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date selector shown when preparing the report.

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

Introduction

Apart from installing Exivity in any on premise environment, Exivity can also be deployed from the Azure Market Place (AMP). Deploying Exivity on AMP is straight forward, and can be finised within a few minutes via your Azure Portal.

Azure Marketplace Offering

Login to your Azure Portal at and then go to the Marketplace to search for the Exivity offer:

Once you've selected the Exivity offering, you should be presented with the following screen:

After clicking the Create button, you will be redirected to the VM deployment wizard

Deployment Wizard

1. Fill in a Windows user/pass and pick your deployment Resource Group:

1. You may select any additional options, but none are required for running Exivity succesfully, so you may skip this page simply by clicking the OK button:

1. Review the summary and click Create to deploy your Exivity VM:

This may take a few minutes. You may review the status of the Virtual Machine in your VM list:

Write down the Public IP address once it is available. Optionally you may configure a custom DNS name to have an easy way to connect.

Connecting to your Exivity instance

You can logon to your Exivity instance with RDP, but after deployment you should be able to connect to your instance using the public IP address or DNS name of your Exivity instance considering the following default URL:

• https://<Your_Public_IP>:8001

The default admin username is admin with password exivity.

Next steps

Exivity is a metering and billing software solution for public and private cloud environments that allows you to report on cloud consumption from any IT resource. Exivity enables you to apply your MSP/CSP business rules and makes any type of Pay-as-you-Go model work. It also facilitates internal charge-back and show-back requirements for Enterprise IT.

These things are done by extracting IT consumption data from various endpoints and then mapping this data to meaningful customer-specific information such as services, customer IDs, names and contracts.

There are four main steps involved in a successful deployment:

1. Extract

2. Transform

3. Report

4. Integrate (optional)

Extract

The Extract step defines your data sources such as:

• APIs that return usage data, service catalogue, rate card, customer/subscriber lists and similarly available records from public or private clouds

• APIs or ODBC queries that return contracts, customer names, IDs and other contextual lookup data from CMDB / CRM systems

• Flat files on disk in CSV, JSON or XML format

• Other HTTP/S sources

Exivity provides a rich scripting interface via its Unified Scriptable Extractor (USE) component which facilitates integration with almost any data source. For most of the big cloud platforms we provide template extractor scripts as part of the product. Additionally you can also write your own USE scripts from scratch in order to integrate with custom data sources.

Transform

This is done using the Transcript component, which executes user-definable scripts (termed tasks) in order to produce a meaningful set of data suitable for reporting against. Often this data will feed a consolidated bill of IT based on the various different consumed services.

Transcript also allows you to define and populate services and rates, either of which may be passed through from cloud data, defined as custom offerings or a mixture of the two.

Report

Exivity provides a modern responsive User Interface, that allows you to 'slice and dice' the processed data in any way you choose. Multiple Report Definitions can be created with ease which allow you to graphically and textually display both cost and usage statistics.

Integrate

We think that Exivity should be part of your automation landscape, where it can provide (for example) line items that can be digested by your ERP and/or invoicing system. Therefore we consider Integrate as the logical final step for any deployment where it is useful.

To this end we offer an open and fully featured REST API. Our GUI uses our own API for all back-end processes meaning that all textual data shown in the Exivity GUI is also obtainable via our API.

Pre-requisites

This tutorial assumes that you have CUR (Cost and Usage Report) set up in your AWS environment. In the event that this is not the case please follow the steps in before proceeding.

Please note that we also need the following requisites:

• S3 bucket where the CUR reports are placed

• The AWS region of the S3 bucket

• The path where the reports are placed inside the S3 bucket

To get this requirements you can go to the Amazon S3 service - Buckets and note the name and the region of our CUR S3 bucket

Once inside the CUR bucket, you must find the path where the monthly reports reside, please navigate the bucket until you find a folder like this one and note the path:

Obtaining the API Credentials

We have to create an IAM User that has read access to the CUR bucket. Please follow these steps:

• Go to IAM - Policies and click on Create policy.

• In the next screen: Service select S3, Actions select Read, Resources select Specific and in bucket click on Add ARN.

• In the next screen, type the name of your bucket followed by /* in Bucket name (example: billing-bucket/*) and click on Add.

• Click on Review Policy.

• Give a Name and a Description to the policy and finally click on Create policy.

Now, we will attach the policy to a user:

• Go to IAM – Users – Add user.

• Add an User name and select Access type: Programmatic access.

• Click on Attach existing Policies directly and filter by the name of the policy you just created.

• Select the policy and click on Next:Tags.

• Add a Key-Value pair for the Tags and click on Next:Review.

• Click on Create User.

• In the next screen click on Download .csv we will use this credentials to populate our Exivity Extractor in the next section.

• Finally click on Close.

Configure Extractor

To create the Extractor in Exivity, browse to Data Sources > Extractors and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. For AWS, please click AWS_CUR_Extractor from the list. Provide a name for the Extractor in the name field, and click the Create button.

Once you have created the Extractor, go to first tab: Variables

• Bucket: Type the name of your S3 CUR bucket.

• Access key: You can find it in the csv that you have downloaded in the previous section.

• Secret key: You can find it in the csv that you have downloaded in the previous section.

• Cur report: Type the name of your CUR report.

• Bucket Directory: Type the path that you got in the previous section (if there is more than one folder separate them with /).

Once you have filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor for a single day:

The Extractor requires one parameters in yyyMMdd format:

• from_date is the date for which you wish to collect consumption data.

When you click the Run Now button, you should get a successful result.

Configure Transformer

Once you have successfully run your AWS CUR Extractor, you should be able to create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers and click the Create Transformer button. Select the AWS CUR Transformer and run it for a single day as a test. Make sure that it is the same day as for which you extracted consumption data in the previous step.

Create Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Report Definition via the menu Reports > Definitions:

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

Download

To obtain a copy of the Exivity installer, you can use the following link:

• https://exivity.com/download

Upgrading

Upgrading to the latest release is a straight-forward process. More information.

Changelog

v2.10.2

March 25, 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where deleting a metadata definition could remove a dataset metadata entry from the database. No actual data was affected by this bug.

• Fixed an issue related to Transformer preview The preview menu could reference an incorrect line number when reporting a Transcript code error.

• Fixed an issue when renaming a DSET If you refered to an incomplete DSET name in a rename statement, Transformer could crash.

• Fixed an escaping error when importing file in a Transfomer The Transformer escape option doesn’t escape last quote: \“ at the end of a field

• Fixed a Transformer issue with skip_corrupted_records When import option skip_corrupted_records was set, import could fail if last column in the record is missing closing quote. This has been resolved.

v2.10.1

February 03, 2020

New features

• Added support for LDAP authentication LDAP authentication was available as beta feature already, and is now generally available. A guide will be added to our documentation soon. Configuration options are available in the Settings screen (Single sign-on tab).

• When a user session is about to expire, an option is provided to prolong the session

• Added option to specify custom dataset name in transform previewer

• Added 'unsaved' warning in extractor/transformer editor A warning is displayed in the toolbar when editing an extractor or transformer and changes are not saved yet.

• Added option to run workflow steps in parallel When adding new steps to a workflow, it is possible to uncheck the 'wait' toggle for any given step. This will then run the step simultaneously with the previous step. When the wait toggle remains checked, all previous steps will finish executing before the step is started.

• Added ability to search parent account names In the Accounts report, it is now possible to search by parent account names in the 'detailed' table.

• Added columns in reports data table Added account and service key as extra columns to the reports 'detailed' table. It is also possible to search for, and export, these values.

• Updated Nginx and PHP Updated the Nginx webserver to version 1.17.8 and PHP to version 7.3.14

• Custom escape character in extractors The escape statement now accepts an optional escape character to be used instead of the default backslash when escaping quotes in the value of a variable.

• Implemented support for JWT web token authentication in extractors In order to support sources that require it, such as Google Cloud using OAuth 2.0, USE now supports the generation of a JSON Web Token. For more information please refer to https://docs.exivity.com/data-pipelines/extract/language/generate_jwt

• Search by account / service key In the Accounts and Services overview screens, it is now possible to search by account/service key instead of the name.

• View metadata in report data tables Metadata fields can now be selected as optional columns in the Accounts and Services reports' 'detailed' tables. They also appear in search and CSV export.

• Added support for Firefox browser

• Improved detection of web-app URL This is especially useful in features such as SAML authentication and the sending of notifications (e.g. e-mail). The app URL is auto-detected and can be modified in the Settings screen (System tab).

• New permissions added Two new permissions have been added to usergroup settings: Manage metadata definitions and Manage datasets. If a usergroup is set to have all permissions, these new ones will automatically be granted to members of that group.

• Added metadata for services Metadata can now be added to all services just like with accounts. Define a metadata definition first, then attach the definition to a dataset in Data pipelines > Datasets. All services in this dataset will now use this set of metadata fields. Metadata information itself can be added and modified in the Services > Overview and is available in the Services reports.

• Breakdown information available for monthly services For monthly services, breakdown information is now available in the Instances report 'detailed' table. To view this, make the 'Usage' column visible by clicking the overflow menu > Columns > Usage. The daily usage breakdown for monthly services is available in a pop-up screen.

• Added account breadcrumbs in Account report legend

• Datasets can now be managed from a dedicated screen Navigate to Data pipelines > Datasets to delete individual days from the set, and to assign a metadata definition to all services in a dataset. We've also made it easier to delete multiple days at once.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a small visual issue in the 'about' page

• Fixed a rare issue with metadata In some cases, selecting a value from a 'list' type metadata field could lead to a crash, This has been fixed.

• Fixed a small visual issue with updating workflow schedules

• Fixed a crash on the adjustments screen When no reports are available in the system, the adjustments screen could crash. This is now fixed.

• Check for key column presence before correlation The correlation function in Transformers now checks for the existence of the key column in the default DSET. Previously, if the column was missing this resulted in an SQL error being logged. In such cases a clearer error message is now generated.

• Improved error reporting when importing non-matched CSVs in a single operation When importing multiple CSV files into a Transformer using a regex to match the filenames, if one had differing columns to the others then an internal error was reported. This is now correctly reported as a normal error as opposed to an internal one.

• Sub-directories in the lookup folder are no longer displayed in the Lookup editor

• Fixed an issue with services using an average charge model For monthly services with an average charge model, if there was usage on the last day of the month then the quantity on that last day may not have been not be factored into the average calculation. This issue has now been fixed.

  • Please note: It is recommended that the reports are reprepared where possible to ensure accurate historical reporting.

• Fixed an issue with links on the Accounts overview page Fixed a minor issue where a link to Data pipelines > Report could sometimes be shown even if a user didn't have the appropriate permissions.

v2.9.5

January 02, 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue when aggregating an empty DSET Aggregating an empty DSET cauld case a Transcript crash, this has now been fixed.

• Fixed resource leak in Workflow Engine Aeon was leaking Windows handles for internal I/O events that caused problems creating new workflow processes after several days of heavy use. This problem is fixed now.

v2.9.4

December 11, 2019

New features

• Improved aggregation function in Transcript

  Aggregation performance improved, especially when processing large sorted datasets

Bug fixes

• Resolved a rare Edify crash Resolved a rare bug with 'end of file' checking in the Edify pre-processor

• Fixed an issue where changes to workflows were not processed in the scheduler

• Case-sensitive column names in correlation

  Correlate doesn't fail with SQL error when two columns in DSET have similar names that differ only in case

v2.9.3

December 04, 2019

New features

• Restricted editing of users logging in from SSO providers Updating the username and password in the API is no longer possible for users logging in from SSO providers.

• Add PUBLIC_ROOT to configuration Previously, if Glass and Proximity were on different machines, Proximity would guess the Glass base URL. This is not possible to set this variable via the PUBLIC_ROOT configuration value.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue with character encoding in the transformer and workflow API endpoints

v2.9.2

November 25, 2019

Bug fixes

• Implemented a fix to avoid global rate revision changes The global rate revision for services that are populated using the set_rate_using parameter in the services block, could cause the rate to be updated. This behavior has now been changed and existing rate revisions will no longer be touched.

v2.9.1

November 15, 2019

New features

• Improved the performance of the workflows screen when there are a large number of historical workflow runs.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a cosmetic issue on the reports page.

• Fixed an issue with the search not showing results on the dashboard.

• Restored the functionality to cancel a login attempt.

• In the transformer preview, datasets are now detected when the import statement has indentation.

• Fixed an issue where no loading indicator was shown on the login screen.

• Fixed an issue with overwriting services

  Fixed an issue which would cause errors to appear in the log (and the service not to be updated) when overwriting a service with an updated version of itself.

v2.9.0

November 13, 2019

New features

• Added a warning when the current sessions is about to expire. A user then is given the option to renew the session without having to log in again.

• Added transformer error annotations. When previewing a transformer script containing an error, the editor will show an annotation on the line where the error occurred.

• Small changes to settings screen, single sign-on tab. In preparation of an upcoming release of an LDAP adapter for single sign-on, some small visual changes to the settings have been made.

• SQLite version updated SQLite updated to version 3.30.1 to match Edify

• Added HTTP redirect limit option in USE Added new option http_redirect_count that allows to limit number of HTTP redirects to follow, or disable following redirects (default) when building an Extractor

• Added function in Transcript to capture parts of a string value

  When building a Transformer, it is now possible to obtain values from a cell by using the @EXTRACT_BEFORE and @EXTRACT_AFTER functions. For more information visit https://docs.exivity.com/data-pipelines/transform/language/if#extract_before

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where some screens could display an Insufficient rights error. This was caused by API calls for which the currently logged in user didn't have access to. This has been fixed by not exposing this part of the functionality in the GUI.

• Fixed an edge-case where the GUI displays a blank screen after an upgrade. In some circumstances, after an upgrade, the GUI would start with a blank screen. It was possible to access the GUI by refreshing the browser window. This is no longer needed.

• Fixed an edge-case where removing a workflow could lead to an error. Sometimes, when deleting workflows containing workflow steps - which in turn contained references to reports which were removed since creating the workflow - the API could not remove the workflow. This has been fixed.

• Fixed an edge-case where the GUI could crash when fetching reports.

• Fixed a bug where the GUI could crash in older browsers in the transformer screen.

• Fixed a bug where a license warning was shown even when there were no problem with the license.

• Added regex validation for metadata string fields. When adding an invalid regex, the user will now get an appropriate message when saving metadata definitions.

• Fixed a bug which could prevent workflows from being updated. In some cases, when a user visited the Status tab in the workflows screen, it would prevent workflows from being updated (including adding/removing schedules and steps). This has been fixed.

• Corrected a off by 1 problem in the Transformer preview Previously, the execution of the transformer script would stop at the currently selected line in the editor, while the interface suggested that execution would stop_after_the currently selected line. This has now been corrected so that execution will include the currently selected line.

• Fixed a bug where the list of columns was not updating when creating a new report.

• Fixed an issue where Extractor arguments where truncated when 0 was one of the arguments.

• Fixed an issue where the Run Now button on the workflow screen could be greyed out in some cases.

• The service worker script in the front-end no longer relies on a third-party content delivery network (CDN).

• Fixed an issue where API requests were not forwarded correctly on hosts with a web proxy setup. This was particularly a problem with requests to the API not invoked from within the GUI, e.g. when loading SAML2 endpoints on the API.

• Solved a security issue (internal reference: EXVT-2812)

• Fixed an issue whereby DST changes could affect certain operations

  Exivity makes frequent use of date ranges for operations such as preparing and running reports. We have identified, and fixed, an issue whereby sometimes when a DST change resulted in the clocks going back an hour, the day in question would be treated as two separate days.

v2.8.3

October 29, 2019

New features

• Ability to rename a service category in the GUI In is now possible to manually rename a service category in the Glass interface

• Notification are now out of beta The configuration of Workflow notifications is now GA

• Ability in the GUI to create and delete and account It is now possible to manually create and delete accounts from a report definition by using the Accounts menu in the Glass interface

• Ability to change the Unit label of a Service in the GUI It is now possible to manually change the Unit label of a Service in the Glass user interface

• Improved Proximity error responses If any of the backend components returns a valid JSON error response, this will now be shown to the user.

• API handling of requests when including relationship When Proximity handled a request to include relationships, it did not return a proper result for a relation that doesn't exists.

• Removed empty arrays from the budget results Proximity now filters out empty arrays from the Horizon budget output

• Added the ability to create and view budgets It is now possible to create and report on multi-level budgets. More information on this feature can be found at https://docs.exivity.com/accounts/budgets

• Add ability to specify a specific dataset while previewing the output from a transformer

• Updating relationships through the API has been improved and is now more efficient in some edge case scenario's

• support for option services = update When populating services in Transcript, it is now possible to update Unit label, Service description

Bug fixes

• Fixed a Glass GUI overflow issue A GUI overflow in the details part of the account overview screen could occur. This has been resolved.

• Proximity will enforce max account level Changed the code to now load the parent account and check the level before adding the relationship when creating new accounts in the GUI / API.

• Dropdown expanding incorrectly to top In budget management screen, a drop down menu could previously expand to the upper region of the screen, while enough space was available downwards.

• Resolved an issue with the Summary Report title When changing the Summary report title in the administration menu, changes were not reflected on the report. This has now been resolved.

• Transformer margins and alignment Corrected visual margins and alignment in Transformer menu

• Resolved 3 cosmetic issues for the Transformer Previewer Preview could go off-screen when moving the divider bar. The vertical scrollbar is now always visible. When not in full-screen, prevent having a vertical scrollbar in the editor as well as in the browser.

• Removed the forward slash prefix from copied lookup file path

• Fixed an issue where the summary report could show null when no header/footer were configured

• Fixed an issue when importing CSV or Excel files in lookups

• System wide date format configuration is now used for all summary report dates

• Fixed an issue when removing a single service using bulk edit

• Fixed an usability issue when moving back or forth multiple steps at once in the reports date range selector

• Fixed an issue where Minimum commit line item was displayed instead of the user-configurable text

• Added support for SAML2 when the API is behind a proxy server

• Improved error reporting in the API for input validation errors

• Proration is now applied correctly Solved an issue where monthly prorated service rates were applied incorrectly

• Rate revision update issue Transcript will now create a new rate revision if needed, when using the serivces block in read only mode

v2.7.2

September 18, 2019

• Fixed a Glass GUI overflow issue A GUI overflow in the details part of the account overview screen could occur. This has been resolved.

• Proximity will enforce max account level Changed the code to now load the parent account and check the level before adding the relationship when creating new accounts in the GUI / API.

• Dropdown expanding incorrectly to top In budget management screen, a drop down menu could previously expand to the upper region of the screen, while enough space was available downwards.

• Resolved an issue with the Summary Report title When changing the Summary report title in the administration menu, changes were not reflected on the report. This has now been resolved.

• Transformer margins and alignment Corrected visual margins and alignment in Transformer menu

• Resolved 3 cosmetic issues for the Transformer Previewer Preview could go off-screen when moving the divider bar. The vertical scrollbar is now always visible. When not in full-screen, prevent having a vertical scrollbar in the editor as well as in the browser.

• Removed the forward slash prefix from copied lookup file path

• Fixed an issue where the summary report could show null when no header/footer were configured

• Fixed an issue when importing CSV or Excel files in lookups

• System wide date format configuration is now used for all summary report dates

• Fixed an issue when removing a single service using bulk edit

• Fixed an usability issue when moving back or forth multiple steps at once in the reports date range selector

• Fixed an issue where Minimum commit line item was displayed instead of the user-configurable text

• Added support for SAML2 when the API is behind a proxy server

• Improved error reporting in the API for input validation errors

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue with nested conditions in Transformers If a Transcript script opens a block of statements using 'if' or 'where' but does not have a closing brace, then if the transformer was run for multiple days it was possible to get an error stating that the maximum depth of nested statements had been reached. A check has now been implemented at the end of script execution which will verify that there are no unclosed statement blocks in effect. If there are then a meaningful error message will be logged and the task will fail.

• Fixed a memory issue in USE A memory related corner case with certain Extractors could trigger an endless loop. This has now been resolved.

• Removed error for future dates When reporting on a future Budget period start date , Horizon produced an invalid error message. This has now been resolved.

v2.7.1

September 11, 2019

New features

• Added the ability to Manage and View Budgets It is now possible to create and report on multi-level budgets. More information on this feature can be found at https://docs.exivity.com/accounts/budgets

• Added header validation in the lookup editor

• Added the ability to change mail server encryption It is now possible to select TLS, SSL or No mail encryption when configuring an e-mail server

• Ability to disable SAML2 user creation Enabled an option to not automatically create new users in SAML2 configurations

• Extractor/Transformer editor will wrap long lines The editor will now wrap very long lines in order to make them more readable.

• Added Budget Viewer API Endpoint Ability in the Proximity API to call budget viewer.

• Ability to Search for Service and Category Added Service Category as a searchable field in the Services Report. Also added Service as searchable field in Instance Report.

• Added API suppot for Global Variables The Proximity API now has CRUD support for Global Variables. Support in Glass GUI, Extractors and Transformers will be added in a future release.

• Solved an issue with component encoding The USE component-encode did previously not encode numeric values. This has now been resolved.

• Added the ability to manually create services A user is now able to manually create one or multiple services in the Service Catalogue

• If the logfile is not writable, terminate the Transcript task Transcript changed to fail if log file cannot be written, rather than falling back to using stderr

• Adjustments are now included in service group subtotals Adjustments were previously ignored from service group subtotals. This behavior has now changed, so that adjustments are now included in both subtotal and total costs in the cost summary report

• Backend support for previewing a custom DSET In Transcript preview mode, a user can select a non-default DSET to preview. GUI support will be added in future release

• Added a warning when using Etc timezones When a timezone in a Workflow is set to Etc, the user will receive a warning to make them aware of the Etc timezone behavior. To learn more, please consult the following article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones#List)

• Added new table to database for Global Variables and Environments

Bug fixes

• Transcript fails if service key exceeds allowed size

  When adding services, if service key is longer then 127 characters, Transcript fails with descriptive error in log file

• Improved diagnostics in Budget engine If there is no usage data to reporting period, Horizon returns more detailed diagnostic information

• Fixed crash in case of invalid budget configuration Horizon was crashing when a budget revision contained no budget items. Issue has been resolved, and a more detailed error message has been added

• Improved error diagnostics in Budget engine in case of a missing filter Horizon was producing incorrect error message when budget item referenced non-existent filter. Error message fixed to report specific probelm

• Improved error handling when creating an RDF where 2 or columns have the same name with different cases Transcript will now analyse the column headings before creating an RDF and generates a meaningful log message when 2 or more column names would conflict before writing the daily RDF

• Transcript fails if service key exceeds allowed size When adding services, if service key is longer then 127 characters, Transcript fails with descriptive error in log file

v2.6.2

August 28, 2019

New features

• Added endpoints to the API to create, update and delete service categories CRUD API endpoints are now available for both services and service categories.

Bug fixes

• When encrypting variables, the encrypted result is now deterministic for any given system When encrypting variables, it was possible that for the same input value, different encrypted values would be generated in the script. This was harmless, but has now been fixed.

• Buffer reset before HTTP retries There was an error were a buffer was not reset before retrying HTTP request. Therefore a buffer in some situations could contain the result of several tries, causing an invalid XML or JSON payload. This error was fixed by resetting the buffer before every retry.

• Step output limited to 1MB Log from standard output of a Workflow step is limited now to 1 MB to minimize database polution

• Added an automatic process to clean up excess workflow logs

• The level parameter on the accounts API endpoint is now an integer instead of a string

• Improved API error messages for validation errors

• Added valid default value for service.charge_model

  Newly added field charge_model contains NULL values for existing services. These are now migrated to peak (1) as that is the default service charging behavior.

• Upgraded nginx to version 1.17.3

  Upgraded the nginx web server from version 1.17.1 to version 1.17.3

v2.5.4

August 08, 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed variable resolution after 'if' block

  Transcript sometimes failed to resolve variables after skipped 'if' block.

• Upgraded PHP to version 7.3.6

v2.5.3

August 06, 2019

New features

• Removed Github links in white labeled configurations Removed the github links for extractors and transformers when using a white labeled install

• Removed default logo and icon for white labeled configurations Removed the standard Exivity logo's and icons when using a white labeled install

• Updated disclaimer for white labeled configurations Disclaimer does not reference Exivity anymore when using a white labeled configuration

• Extractor scripts can now use the HTTP PATCH method The 'http' statement now supports the HTTP PATCH method

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue with notification drivers

  Pigeon could not find the notification drivers for Slack and SMS. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an invalid API error when resetting password Reset password could return an internal error (500), if a password didn't exist for the user. This was an invalid error, and has been changed to a valid 204 response.

v2.5.1

July 31, 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where a log message could be incorrectly tagged as an error When creating services, an error message may be generated in the logfile which begins "services: set proration for service". This should be a debug level message and is not an error. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an issue where the error message generated by the append statement could be incorrect Fixed an issue whereby when appending one DSET to another, if the first DSET did not exist then the resulting error message in the log would state that it was the second DSET that doesn't exist.

• Fixed an issue with embeds When the embed option is enabled, if the fields in the CSV to import were quoted then embed would not work as expected. This has now been fixed.

• Don't resolve variables in 'else' branch being skipped Transcript doesn't resolve variables in 'else' branch when 'else' is not executed, therefore it removed 'unknown variable' errors in the situations when variables declared and used only inside 'else'

v2.5.0

July 10, 2019

New features

• Transcript script content is stored in RDF A copy of the ETL processing script used for generating data for any given day is now stored in each RDF alongside the processed data itself, thus enhancing support and diagnostic processes.

• New import option to include the name of the imported file(s) It is now possible in a Transformer to automatically add a column to each dataset, which will contain the name of the imported file(s). This can be achieved by enabling the filename_column = true import option.

• Support for auto retrying failed HTTP requests in USE If an HTTP request fails during the execution of an Extractor, the script can now be changed to set the option http_retry_count. This will determine the amount of times a HTTP request is retried. The default value is 2 retries.

• Extractor scripts now have separate automatic variables for diagnosing HTTP related issues When connecting to a server over HTTP, the HTTP_STATUS_CODE variable will now always contain a numeric value. Any textual supplementary information pertaining to that value can be found in a new variable called HTTP_STATUS_TEXT. In the event that a timeout occurs and no HTTP response is received, the HTTP_STATUS_CODE variable will contain the value -1.

Bug fixes

• Continue when http get_header yields no results When retrieving the text of a header from an HTTP response in an Extractor using the http get_header feature, the Extractor script wil now continue to execute even if no header content was found.

• Avoid overwriting of services because of charge_model introduction Fixed a bug where if the charge_model was changed, the update would not be reflected after executing the Transformer script. Now, when using option services = overwrite in a script, services will be recreated if the charge model changes.

• When creating services sometimes a rate revision would be created when there was no need to do so Under certain circumstances, when updating the service definitions via the services statement in Transcript a new revision could be created which was a duplicate of the existing revision. This has now been fixed.

v2.4.7

June 21, 2019

New features

• Service category totals are added to summary reports

• Removed the 'Use local storage' configuration setting Now, the data in the interface is always synced with the server in order to better ensure data integrity.

• Fixed an issue when aggregating a DSET that is not the default DSET The aggregate statement may have failed to correctly aggregate a DSET if the DSET ID specified in the statement was not the default DSET. This has now been fixed.

• When logging out, users are redirected to the login screen automatically Instead of showing an intermediate screen requiring a user to first click on a link to login again.

• Streamlined the usergroup permissions to align with the new navigation structure

• Created new automatic variable UNIX_UTC in USE A new automatic variable is now available in extractor scripts. This is called UNIX_UTC and will return the current UTC time as a UNIX timestamp value.

• Implemented a new 'average' monthly charging model Monthly services may now be created which are charged based on the average quantity used throughout the month.

• Deprecated the current budget feature in favour of a new implementation The new budget implementation will be released in Q2-2019.

• Added an option to Transcript to skip invalid records during import It is now possible to skip invalid records during the import phase of a Transformer.

• Improved ordering of options in the side menu The menu on the left hand side of the interface has been overhauled in order to group the options in a more logical manner.

• Now only privileged users will see an alert message when debugging is enabled

• Manual account administration The Exivity back-end now supports manual creation, editing and deletion of accounts GUI support for this feature will be included in a future release

• Added lookup editor for ad-hoc data sources Lookup data sources can be used for various types of data sources not obtainable through automated extractors. Edit lookups by navigating to Data pipelines > Lookups. Read more at docs.exivity.com.

• Added the option to modify or translate certain labels displayed by the Exivity interface. Find the new options by navigating to Administration > Settings > Translations.

Bug fixes

• Workflow notifications status trigger Fixed an issue where a notifications was always send regardless whether the failed / successful condition was met

• Workflow status log historical dates Fixed an issue where the status logs for a workflow could display incorrect timestamps

• Fixed an issue which could lead to a crash in the GUI for certain edge-case adjustment configurations

• Fixed a small issue which prevented empty metadata values to be stored

• Do not send notifications for internal workflows Changed behavior of the Workflow engine to only send out notifications for user created workflows, and not for internal/garbage collector jobs

• Updating Workflows during Workflow execution Fixed an issue were none of the workflows could be changed while a Workflow was running

• Fixed a bug which prevented certain pages from showing correctly when no reports are defined

• Fixed an issue whereby retrieving audit information from the API could fail

• Fixed an issue with workflows containing 12 steps or more Fixed an issue where workflows with 12 or more steps could cause an API error.

• Fixed an issue with newlines in scheduler log entries On occasion, it was possible that log entries generated by the scheduler would contain newline characters which could cause problems with the log viewer. This has now been fixed (log entries should no longer contain newlines).

• Fixed an issue whereby credentials in a connection string could appear in the logfile When using a direct connection string with credentials to collect from an external database, under some circumstances an error message could contain a copy of the connection string. Log entries containing connection strings should no longer contain credentials.

• Workflow management menu option is hidden from users without permission to manage workflows When logged in as a user who does not have permission to manage workflows, the GUI will hide workflow management options. Previously, users without the rights to do so were unable to perform any actual workflow management even though the option was displayed.

• Fixed an issue that could cause workflows to stop working Fixed an issue whereby on rare occasions, the scheduler could leave its configuration database in a locked state, leading to problems running workflows.

• Implemented support for decompressing ZIP files that expand to more than 2Gb

• Fixed nested foreach loops Fixed issues where a nested foreach loop could cause issues with some XML parslets

• Fixed an issue whereby the data status associated with a report would sometimes not be shown When accessing a report definition, sometimes the data status (the list of dates and the status of the data associated with each date) would not appear until the report definition was accessed a second time. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed a bug which sometimes made it impossible to go into full-screen mode in the GUI

• Fixed a bug which caused a warning to be incorrectly displayed when users tried to change their password

• Fixed an issue whereby on rare occasions monthly services could have adjustments applied more than once Fixed an issue whereby if a monthly service had new instances appear on a date in the month after the date that the first instance of that service was seen, and if adjustments were applied to that service + instance combination then it was sometimes possible for the adjustments to be applied more than once.

• Fixed an issue which could cause a GUI crash after deleting a service After deleting a service, it was possible that the GUI would display an error when subsequently viewing service rates. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed a rare issue where importing into a transformation script could cause a crash When importing files using a wildcard, Transcript would crash if one of the files to import was empty and 'option embed' was enabled. This has now been fixed.

v2.3.1

January 23, 2019

New features

• The 'export' statement will no longer generate an error if asked to process an empty DSET while option mode = strict is set

• Implemented user-definable timeout setting when retrieving data from HTTP sources

  When retrieving data from HTTP sources, the number of seconds to wait for a server response before timing out can be defined using set http_timeout.

v2.3.0

January 17, 2019

New features

• Added editable labels for report levels

• Added the ability to mass delete services

• Invoice report is now called Summary report

• The 'finish' statement in Transcript can be made to cause the task to fail if the DSET it's given is empty

  Previously, when creating an RDF, the finish statement would perform no action if the DSET to create the RDF from was empty. This is still the case if 'option mode = permissive' is in force, but if 'option mode = strict' then the finish statement will now generate an error. The error will cause the task to fail for the current day, and if 'option continue' is not enabled, the task will be terminated, else the task will move onto the next date in the range of days being processed.

• When importing multiple files using the pattern option to import, any invalid files will be skipped When multiple files matching a pattern are imported, any of those files that are malformed or otherwise non-importable will be skipped.

• Added the ability to exit a subscript invoked via #include in a transform script The 'return' statement, when used in a Transform script, will now cause script execution to resume from the statement following the #include statement in a parent script that referenced the script containing the 'return' statement.

• Increased the performance of the correlate statement Correlation should now be significantly faster than it was previously

• Increased the performance of the aggregate statement

  Aggregation should now be significantly faster than it was previously

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where users couldn't update their own details (including their password)

• Fixed a bug where only 10 datasets were displayed when creating a new report

• Fixed a bug where the mail sender name was not persisted in the configuration

• Fixed an issue when importing CSV files containing quotes

  When importing a CSV file with two successive quote characters at the end of a field, Transcript would reject the file as invalid. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an issue where deleting data let to GUI crashes on occasion When deleting data (RDFs) associated with a report, it could be that if one or more days had previously been overwritten, a stale database entry would cause issues after the RDFs were deleted. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed a bug whereby using terminate within the body of an if statement in a Transform script could cause an error Invoking terminate in an if block when running a transform script against a range of dates could cause the error The maximum number of nested blocks (32) is already in use. This has now been fixed.

v2.2.1

December 13, 2018

Bug fixes

• A bug was fixed which could lead to an error in the invoice report when using a rate with a minimum commit set

• Fixed an issue with minimum commit It was possible that when applying minimum commit to a service, that other services would be affected by that minimum commit. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an issue when retrieving NULL fields from an ODBC query When using ODBC to collect data, the presence of NULL values in the results could cause USE to crash. This has been fixed.

v2.2.0

November 30, 2018

New features

• Added the ability to view instance level details on the invoice reports.

• Added the ability to customize the report exports (CSV format only) field delimiter and decimal separator. These settings are system-wide and available to administrators by navigating to Administration > Configuration > Formatting.

• Added the ability for users to reset their own passwords. This requires the email address of users to be set and a working server configuration for sending emails. This can be configured in Administration > System > Environment.

• Logfiles generated from workflow tasks now include a timestamp. This prevents logfiles from consecutive runs of the same task from being overwritten.

• Workflow status now automatically refreshes after a manual run.

• Added a new Environment tab in Administration > System. In this tab, information about the system the Exivity instance is running on can be filled out. In the future this will be expanded to include more configuration options.

• Invoice reports now include minimum commit uplifts as separate entries.

• Carriage-returns and line-feeds in data extracted using ODBC are now replaced with spaces. When extracting data with USE, the presence of newlines in the data could cause corrupt CSV output. Carriage Return and Line Feed characters in data extracted from ODBC are therefore now replaced with spaces.

• Enhanced expression support in the Extractor component. Conditional expressions have been enhanced in the Extractor component such that more complex conditions can be evaluated and additional operations can be performed. Additionally, it is now possible to set a variable value using an expression.

• Services can now be manually deleted using the GUI.

Bug fixes

• The datasets selector visible when creating a new report definition is now alphabetically sorted.

• Fixed a bug which caused the contents of extractor editor to not update after updating variables. The contents of the extractor script itself was always saved after updating variables, only those changes were not visible in the editor.

• Fixed a bug which caused the account depth selector to reset after performing an upgrade.

• Fixed a bug which could cause the interface to become unresponsive after preparing a report.

• Fixed an issue when running Transform scripts for days with 25 hours in them. When running a Transform script with a data-date representing a day where the clocks were adjusted such that the day had 25 hours in it, the script would be executed a second time automatically once the first had completed. This could lead to unexpected errors and log entries on occasion, and has now been fixed.

• When writing to CSV files in USE, embedded CR/LF characters are converted to spaces. USE will now automatically strip out embedded carriage-return and line-feed characters when writing data to CSV files. Each unique occurrence of one or more sequential CR/LF characters will be replaced with a single space.

• Fixed a bug whereby the body of an 'if' statement in the Transformer could terminate prematurely. In some cases, using an 'import' statement with an 'options' block within the body of an 'if' statement could cause statements following the 'import' to be skipped. This has now been fixed.

v2.1.5

November 22, 2018

Bug fixes

• Updated the documentation links in the header to point to our new documentation site.

• Fixed grouping behaviour in the details table of the accounts report. In some cases, accounts could appear grouped under the wrong parent account in the 'Detailed' table in the accounts report.

v2.1.4

October 31, 2018

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue with incorrect quantities sometimes showing on reports. Occasionally, when running a report for a range of dates, the quantities on one or more services differed from the quantity for that service shown when a report was run for a different date range (or just the day in question). This issue has now been fixed.

v2.1.3

October 26, 2018

New features

• The USE 'basename' statement can now write its results to a new variable. Previously, the 'basename' statement would always modify the value of the variable whose name was supplied as the argument. It can now also accept a literal string and create a new, or update an existing, variable to hold the result.

• Archives in GZIP format can now be decompressed using USE. USE now supports the 'gunzip' statement which can be used to inflate GZIP'd data. Details of how to use this statement may be found at https://docs.exivity.com/diving-deeper/extract/language/gunzip

• FIxed an issue whereby when running a Transform script the Audit database would be locked for the duration of the task. Transcript now only opens the Audit database when it needs to, reducing the likelihood of encountering errors pertaining to a locked audit database in the logfile.

• A new system variable is now available containing the number of days in the current month. The existing dataMonth variable, which contains the yyyyMM of the current month is now supplemented with a new variable called dataMonthDays which contains the number of days in that month.

• Changed default service type to 'automatic' in the 'services' statement in Transcript. When creating services, if no 'type' parameter is provided then the default service type will now be be set to 'automatic'.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue whereby when creating a service, the audit indicated that the service creation failed. When a service definition is successfully created, Transcript will now correctly audit that event as opposed to indicating that the attempt failed.

• Fixed an issue whereby over-writing services could result in database errors in the logfile. Sometimes when overwriting services, a constraint error would be logged in the logfile and the service would not have any rate associated with it. This has been fixed.

v2.1.2

October 18, 2018

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause database corruption.

  Fixed an issue that could cause database corruption due to the Aeon database being held open for long periods of time.

v2.1.1

October 10, 2018

New features

• Added a live preview feature when working with transforms. A new feature has been added which can display a live preview of the transformer output. Note: this feature is currently in beta and will be further updated in the next release.

• The code editor has been updated. The code editor for Extractor and Transformer scripts has been updated (it now uses the open source Monaco editor - https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/) resulting in a significant improvement over our previous editor. This greatly enhances the user experience when editing scripts in the GUI. Note: This change also lays the foundation for more advanced features going forwards.

• Charges for monthly services now take quantity into consideration as well as price. If two or more days in a month have the same highest price then the one with the highest quantity will be reported. Previously, the first seen was reported which could lead to discrepancies between the reported quantity and price on the report.

• When running reports blank instance values are now displayed as a hyphen. When running reports against data with blank instance values in the usage data, the instance value will now be represented as a hyphen, which improves the aesthetics of the report.

• Added hardware information to Transcript log-files. Log-files created by Transcript now contain information about the CPU and RAM at the top of the log.

• Increased auditing information in Transcript. Events relating to service, rate and RDF changes are now audited

Bug fixes

• Removed COGS option for users without rights to view COGS information. In the services and instances report, users with no access to view COGS will no longer be able to select the COGS type in the details table. Note: This bug never allowed users without appropriate access rights to view the actual COGS data.

• Fixed a bug where the list of datasets on the report definition page was only showing the first 10 results. This could result in an inability to create new reports using datasets that were not included in those results

• A link to the instances report has been added to the search feature in the header.

• The service interval column in the instances report now contains data. Previously this column was always blank

• Fixed a bug where searching for units within a services reports leads to a GUI crash.

• Fixed an issue whereby very rarely a charge would not be included in reports. On very rare occasions, information in a record in the prepared report caches was not included in the output when a report was run. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an issue that could cause Aeon database corruption. Fixed an issue that could cause database corruption (and workflows to fail) due to the Aeon database being held open for long periods of time.

• Fixed an issue whereby re-using an existing named buffer in USE for ODBC purposes could lead to unexpected results. Fixed an issue in USE whereby if an existing named buffer was re-used to store data retrieved from ODBC then a new buffer could have been created with the same name as the existing buffer, and attempts to reference it would return the old data.

• Fixed an issue when executing ODBC queries that return no data. Using the ODBC capability to execute a query that returns no data will no longer cause an extractor to return an error.

v2.0.6

September 05, 2018

New features

• Upgraded the underlying API framework For more information, please refer to the Laravel release notes.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue whereby 'append' could crash if one or other DSET was empty When executing the 'append' statement in a transformation script, if one or other of the DSETs involved in the operation was empty (having no data rows) then a crash could occur. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an issue where an expression that evaluated as FALSE could show the wrong line number in a log message The DEBUG level logfile entry indicating an expression is true or false would contain a reference to the wrong line number if the expression evaluated to false. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed an issue whereby some comparisons would evaluate incorrectly in expressions Fixed and issue whereby in some cases where a value was quoted in an expression, the quotes would be considered part of the value itself.

• Fixed a condition where reports were not showing for non-admins

• Quantity metric is available again for the timeline chart on the services and instances reports

• Reports in the navigation menu dropdown are now alphabetically ordered

v2.0.5

August 28, 2018

New features

• Ability to filter data in report using search query: The search bar in Accounts, Services and Instances reports now supports the use of operators (for example >and <) to filter your results based on column values or strings.

• Add avg_unit_based_rate to report/run API endpoint Added the average per unit rate field to the report/run API endpoint and a placeholder for the average per interval rate which will be implemented later.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where deleting services could lead to adjustments not displaying correctly

• Rate column in report details tables now use the configured rate precision setting

• Fixed an issue whereby scheduled tasks that output more than 4kb of data to the console could suspend execution and do nothing until they timed out

v2.0.4

August 22, 2018

New features

• Transcript can now normalise scientific decimal numbers to standard format: When processing data that contains numbers in scientific format (such as 2.1E-5) the normalise statement can now be used to convert these to standard decimal notation (0.000021 in the above case) using the form normalise columncolNameas standardwhere colNameis the column containing the values to convert. Any values already in decimal will be unchanged, except that any trailing zeros will be removed from them. Non-numeric values will be converted to 0.

• Support group and group_col as service parameters in Transcript: In the serviceand servicesstatements in Transcript, the parameters to define the service category are category and category_colThese parameters now have aliases of groupand group_col respectively, for those who prefer to use that terminology.

Bug fixes

• The replace statement in Transcript will no longer behave unexpectedly when given an empty string as the target to replace: When using replace to update substrings within the values in a column, if the target string (the text to replace) is empty then Transcript will generate a meaningful log entry explaining that it cannot be used to replace empty strings, and will no longer overwrite non-blank column values with multiple copies of the replacement text.

• The export statement in Transcript now supports backslashes as path delimiters: When specifying a relative path for the exportstatement, Transcript will automatically create any directories that do not exist in that path. Previously there was a bug whereby the auto-creation of those directories would only work if UNIX-style forward slashes were used as delimiters in the path. This has now been fixed and Windows or UNIX style delimiters may be used when specifying an export path.

• Fixed a bug in the scheduler that could cause schedules to fail: In some cases schedules could fail for no obvious reason. This has now been fixed.

v2.0.3

August 17, 2018

New features

• USE scripts can now be forced to terminate with an error result Previously, the 'terminate' statement could be used to cancel script execution, but its use would always indicate that the script ran successfully. This may not be appropriate in all cases (for example if an error is detected by the script itself but ultimately cannot be resolved satisfactorily). The 'terminate' statement will still cause a script to exit with a success result by default, but may now be invoked as 'terminate with error' such that an error status is returned instead.

• Added more service attributes as optional columns in the reports details table. The following extra service attributes can now be enabled as columns in the report details table: interval, charge type, cogs type and proration.

• Support 'group' and 'groupcol' as service parameters in Transcript In the 'service' and 'services' statements in Transcript, the parameters to define the service category are 'category' and 'category_col'. These parameters now have aliases of 'group' and 'group_col' respectively, for those who prefer to use that terminology.

• Reduced the chance of a 'database is locked' warning when preparing reports When preparing reports, on occasion it is possible for a warning to appear in the logfile pertaining to the global database being locked. When this warning happened, it could cause some days in the reporting period to remain unprepared. A known specific cause of this issue has been fixed, significantly reducing the likelihood of it happening.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where an ODBC connection could cause a crash in USE When executing an ODBC-based collection in USE, under certain circumstances an incorrect direct connection string could cause a crash. This has been fixed. Additionally, when an ODBC error occurs the error written to the logfile contains more detail than in previous releases.

• The order of workflow steps in the status tab now corresponds to the order of workflow steps in the configuration tab.

• An issue has been fixed where old user preferences could conflict by updates in the GUI, leading to errors when loading the service and instance reports.

• An issue has been fixed where certain characters in a workflow status could lead to errors in the API. Sometimes, when running a scheduled task, the output written to the database contains non-printable characters. The API now re-encodes those characters, which means the GUI will now correctly show the status for those workflows.

• When selecting a reporting period that spans multiple months, the charts will now only show a single label for each month.

• Fixed a USE crash bug with certain combinations of conditional expressions Fixed an issue whereby if an expression with more than 2 parameters was followed later in the script by an expression with fewer parameters than the first, a crash would occur.

• Fixed issue where an extractor could crash when using a parslet after formatting some JSON A bug has been fixed whereby if the 'json format' statement was used to prettify some JSON in a named buffer, use of a parslet to extract data from the JSON could cause a crash.

• Fixed an issue where sometimes an XML parslet would cause an 'out of memory' error in USE When using an XML parslet, it was possible that an 'out of memory' error would be returned in the logfile and the script would fail, even on small input files. This has now been fixed.

v2.0.2

August 03, 2018

Bug fixes

• The 'export' statement in Transcript now supports backslashes as path delimiters

  When specifying a relative path for the 'export' statement, Transcript will automatically create any directories that do not exist in that path. Previously there was a bug whereby the auto-creation of those directories would only work if UNIX-style forward slashes were used as delimiters in the path. This has now been fixed and Windows or UNIX style delimiters may be used when specifying an export path.

• The 'replace' statement in Transcript will no longer behave unexpectedly when given an empty string as the target to replace

  When using 'replace' to update substrings within the values in a column, if the target string (the characters to replace) is empty then Transcript will generate a meaningful log entry explaining that it cannot be used to replace empty strings, and will no longer overwrite non-blank column values with multiple copies of the replacement text.

v2.0.1

July 25, 2018

New features

• Increased default timeout when retrieving data from HTTP servers

  Currently a USE script will fail if more than 3 minutes elapse without response when downloading data from an HTTP server. This has been increased to 5 minutes to cater for slow APIs.

v2.0.0

July 19, 2018

New features

• Transcript can now normalise scientific decimal numbers to standard format When processing data that contains numbers in scientific format (such as 2.1E-5) the 'normalise' statement can now be used to convert these to standard decimal notation (0.000021 in the above case) using the form 'normalise column colName as standard' where 'colName' is the column containing the values to convert. Any values already in decimal will be unchanged, except that any trailing zeros will be removed from them. Non-numeric values will be converted to 0.

• When accessing the GUI via http visitors will be redirected to https automatically

• Progress indicator in the report/run endpoint can be disabled To disable, set the progress parameter to 0. More information at our API documentation.

• Filter selectors show which items are present in the current report The service category selector in the services and instances report, and service selector in the instances report will show items not available in the current report grayed out.

• On-demand workflow execution Workflows can now be executed on demand. Also the schedule for a Workflow can be disabled.

• Single workflows can now have multiple schedules

• Workflows can now be scheduled in a specific timezone

• Added the average rate column to the reports details table

• Added the ability to show various totals in reports summary widget Summary widget now has the option to show all totals (previous behaviour) or only the totals for the current search results, or for the current pinned items.

• Added report shortcuts to the dashboard

• COGS, fixed COGS and fixed prices are now evaluated per instance when preparing reports Previously, if a service was created that used any of fixed_price_col, cogs_col or fixed_cogs_col to indicate that the rate in question should be obtained from the usage data for any given day, then the charge engine would use a single value from the specified column(s) and apply that to all instances of the services for the day. Now, each row of usage is individually consulted when preparing reports such that the specific value on that row is used (as is already the case when using 'rate_col' for pass-through rates)

• When extracting XML or JSON values, parse errors no longer cause the USE script to terminate Previously, when using a static parslet to extract XML or JSON values from the contents of a named buffer, if the buffer contained invalid JSON or XML then the USE script failed with an error in the log saying that the contents of the buffer could not be parsed. Now, if a named buffer contains data that is not valid JSON or XML, any attempt to extract a value from it using a static parslet will be expanded to the value EXIVITY_INVALID_XML or EXIVITY_INVALID_JSON.

• Improved performance and lowered memory requirements when running a report Previously, in some circumstances running a report could take longer than expected and consume large amounts of memory in the process. The performance and memory use of the report engine have both been improved.

• Reduced memory and increased performance when preparing reports Previously it was possible for some installations to use large amounts of memory and exhibit unreasonably slow performance when preparing reports. Preparing reports is not intended to be a realtime feature and will always incur some time overhead, but this time should now be significantly reduced in many cases, and the memory required to complete the process will be much less.

• New output format for the /report/run endpoint in the API Due to changes to the charge engine, the output format of the /report/run endpoint in the API has changed. An up-to-date overview of the attributes returned by this endpoint can be found at our API documentation.

• Free formatted ODBC connect strings are now supported in USE This exposes all ODBC driver options to the user, and avoid the requirement of creating manually DSN at the operating system level.

• The 'split' statement now supports discarding unwanted result columns When using the 'split' statement it is now possible to discard all but a selected range of the resulting new columns.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a Transcript crash when deleting a DSET Transcript will no longer crash in certain circumstances when deleting a DSET using the 'delete dset' statement.

• The Transcript 'export' statement now creates a path automatically When exporting data from Transcript, if a relative path is specified as part of the export filename, Transcript will automatically create the path if it does not exist. The path will be created relative to /exported

• Changed the behaviour of some columns in the report tables The optional _per unit charges and per interval charges columns on the report pages represent a fraction of the total charge and as such should be considered a subtotal rather than a rate._

• Allow users to see anonymous roll-up accounts even if they have no access When a user only has access to some children of a parent account, reports will now show the combined usage of those accounts grouped as an unknown account in the reports.

• Fixed a rare bug where incorrect character encoding in the data source could lead to reports not loading

• Currency symbol is no longer shown for quantity graphs

• An issue has been fixed which could lead to empty reports when there actually was report data In some cases, selecting certain combination of filters could lead to reports showing No data while there actually was report data for the current set of filters. This behaviour was observed mainly on the instances report page.

• Usernames are now allowed to contain special characters As a side effect of changing usernames to be case-insensitive, using special characters was no longer permitted since v1.8.1. This restriction is now removed.

• Changed the behaviour of clearing the charge engine caches Clearing the charge engine (Edify) caches unprepares all reports. The button on the About page now reflects this.

• It is now possible to use decimal values for adjustment amounts Previously this was only possible through the API. The GUI has been updated to also support this.

• Changing the date in the invoice report no longer resets the account selection Previously, when changing the date range on the invoice report screen, the current account selection (dropdown inside the invoice page) would automatically select the first account in the list. This has now been fixed to remember the selection when changing the date.

• Exivity now works correctly when installed in a directory containing spaces

• Transcript variables were not properly expanded when using in an import filter

• Export of consolidated invoice now contains data for all accounts Previously, selecting the CSV or Excel export of a consolidated invoice would only export data for the first account on the invoice.

• Fixed crash bug in the 'services' statement When creating services, Transcript will no longer crash if a blank interval or model value is encountered while building the service definitions.

Older release notes can be found here.

Pre-requisites

This tutorial assumes that you have a Billing Account for your Google Cloud Projects in place. In the event this is not the case please follow the steps in this tutorial before proceeding.

Setting up BigQuery

Exivity will leverage on the GCP BigQuery service. This will enable the export of detailed Google Cloud billing data to a BigQuery dataset, giving Exivity the capability to query the billing data in a more granular manner than with the standard file export (which is going to be deprecated by Google).

First and foremost, Exivity will create a dataset containing the billing table which will be periodically queried. Please follow these instructions:

1. Go to the BigQuery service page.

2. Select the project that will contain your dataset in the project drop down.

3. Click CREATE DATASET.

   1. Enter a Dataset ID

   2. Select Data location (region)

   3. Set Default table expiration to Never

   4. Set Encryption to Google-managed key

4. Finally, click Create dataset

5. Note the Project, BigQueryProject and Table, these parameters will be used by Exivity on a later stage.

Once you have the dataset created in BigQuery you need to enable Cloud Billing export to BigQuery:

1. Sign in to the Cloud Billing Console, select Organization and main Billing Account.

2. Go to the Billling Export tab.

3. Click Edit Settings to enable the export.

   1. Select the project where you previously created the BigQuery dataset.

   2. Select the specific dataset from the Billing export dataset list.

   3. Click Save.

Creating Exivity Service Account

Exivity requires a GCP Service Account with the BigQuery User role asscociated in order to retrieve the billing data. Please follow this manual to create a Service Account, this manual to associate a Private Key with the service account, and finally this manual to associate the role with the service account.

Configuring the Extractor

To create the Extractor in Exivity, browse to Data Sources > Extractors and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. For Google Cloud, please click Google_Cloud from the list. Provide a name for the Extractor in the name field, and click the Create button.

Once you have created the Extractor, go to Variables tab and fill the parameters:

• Hostname: Default endpoint for Google BigQuery with version

• Private: Provide the RSA private key PEM format

• Email: Mail address / service account associated with the private key, obtained in the Creating Exivity Service Account section.

• Project: Main GCP Project name.

• BigQuery project: GCP BigQuery Billing Project, obtained in the Setting up BigQuery section.

• BigQuery table: GCP BigQuery Billing Table, obtained in the Setting up BigQuery section.

Finally, click on Update.

Once you have filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor for a single day:

The Extractor requires two parameters in yyyMMdd format:

• from_date is the date for which you wish to start collecting consumption data.

• to_date is the end date for which you wish to collect consumption data.

When you click the Run Now button, you should get a successful result.

Configure a Transformer

Once you have successfully run your Google Cloud Extractor, you should be able to create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers and click the Create Transformer button.

Select the Google Cloud Transformer that you just created, go to the Run Tab and run it for a single day as a test. Make sure that it is the same day as for which you extracted consumption data in the previous step.

When you click the Run Now button, you should get a successful result.

Create your Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Report Definition via the menu Reports > Definitions:

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

Introduction

When deploying the vCloud Extractor template for Exivity, some input and configuration is required from your vCloud environment. The following process must be completed in order to report on vCloud consumption:

1. Create Exivity vCloud user (vCloud < 9.1)

2. Create Exivity vCloud user (vCloud >= 9.1)

3. Configure an Extractor

4. Configure a Transformer

5. Create your Report

Create Exivity vCloud user (vCloud < 9.1)

For environments with a vCloud previous to 9.1 Exivity needs a user with the sysadmin role on the system ORG. Please follow this procedure:

• Click the Administration tab and click Users in the left panel.

• Click New, fill the required details.

• Note the username and password.

• Finally, click OK.

Create Exivity vCloud user (vCloud >= 9.1)

For environments with vCloud version 9.1 or higher, you can create a user with more fine grained permissions. Exivity needs a user with a reader role on the system ORG. Please follow this procedure:

First you will need to create a new custom role for the Exivity user:

• From the main menu, select Administration.

• In the left panel, under Access Control, click Roles

• Click New.

• Enter a name and, optionally, a description for the new role.

• Select the rights that you want to associate with the role. Exivity needs all the View Rights in the different tabs and also Perform Administrator Queries under the General tab.

• Click Save.

Once you have the Role created, you need to setup a new user and assign the Role previously created:

• On the VMware Cloud Service toolbar, click the VMware Cloud Services icon and select Identity & Access Management.

• Click Add Users.

• On the Active Users tab, fill the details of the user you want to add to the system organization.

• In the Role in organization text box, assign the role previously created.

Configure an Extractor

To create the Extractor, browse to Data Sources > Extractors in the Exivity GUI and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. For vCloud:

• Pick vCloud_Extractor_AdminVM from the list

• Provide a name for the Extractor in the name field

• Click the Create button.

Once you've created the Extractor, next go to theVariables tab:

Fill in all required variables with the values that you gathered in the previous step. You have the option to encrypt them. Click on Update.

Once you've filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor clicking on Run Now:

Configure a Transformer

Once you have successfully run your vCloud Extractor, you can create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers in the Exivity GUI. Browse to this location and click the Create Transformer button. Make any changes that you feel necessary and then select the run tab to execute it for a single day (today) as a test.

Create a Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Reports > Definitions.

Select your vCloud dataset, and your preferred Reporting Columns to break down the report (we recommend only Org_name and VDC for the default report). When you are ready, click on Create.

Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date range from the date selector shown when preparing the report.

Introduction

When deploying the vCenter Extractor template for Exivity, it is required to configure a user with approperiate permissions. Additionally, the following process must be completed in order to report on vCenter consumption:

1. Create Exivity vCenter user

2. Configure an Extractor

3. Configure a Transformer

4. Create your Report

Exivity supports Out of the Box integration with vCenter version 6.5 and higher. For version before 6.5, please contact support@exivity.com.

Create Exivity vCenter user

Exivity needs a user with a reader role in order to retrieve consumption data. Please follow this procedure:

• In your vCenter Configuration Manager go to Configuration > Local Users and Groups > Users.

• Create a new User, insert username and password.

• Take note of the username and password, they will be used later on to configure Exivity

• Click on Create.

• Under Users and Groups, click Add, select the previously created user.

• On the Select Users and Groups dialog, click Add, and then click OK.

• Add a Reader role in the dropdown.

• Finally click on OK.

Configure an Extractor

To create the Extractor, browse to Data Sources > Extractors in the Exivity GUI and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. To create a new Extractor based off the vCenter template follow these steps:

• Provide a name for the Extractor in the Name field above

• Pick vCenter 6.5 (VM Inventory REST API) template from the list

• Click the Create button.

Once you've created the Extractor, go to theVariables tab:

Fill in all required variables with the values that you gathered in the previous step. You have the option to encrypt a variable in case it contains sensitive information (i.e. password) by clicking the lock icon on the right of each variable field. When finished, click Update.

Once you've filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor clicking on Run Now:

If the variables are correct and your vCenter is reachable for Exivity, you should get a successful result.

Configure a Transformer

Once you have successfully run your vCenter Extractor, you can create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers in the Exivity GUI. Browse to this location and click the Create Transformer button. Make any changes that you feel necessary and then select the run tab to execute it for a single day (today) as a test.

Create a Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Reports > Definitions:

Select your vCenter dataset, and your preferred Reporting Columns to break down the report (we recommend only cluster_name for the default report). When you are ready, click on Create.

Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date range from the date selector shown when preparing the report.

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

Introduction

When deploying the Azure EA Extraction template for Exivity, some configuration is required within your Azure EA environment. The following process must be completed in order to report on Azure EA consumption:

1. Create an Access Key and Secret in your Azure EA portal

2. Configure the Azure EA Extractor

3. Configure your Azure EA Transformer

4. Create a Report definition

Creating an Access Key & Secret

In order for Exivity to authenticate with Azure EA, you will need to create an access key and secret in the Azure EA Portal. Also you will need to find your enrollment number. To do this, login to your Azure EA Portal on https://ea.azure.com and navigate to the Reports menu:

Just under the Windows logo in the left menu section you will find your enrollment number which you will need to provide later when configuring the Extractor. To create the Access Key & Secret, click on Download Usage and then on API Access Key. This brings you to the menu where you can manage your Access Keys and corresponding secret which you will need in order to configure the data Extractor.

Configure Extractor

To create the Extractor, browse to Data Sources > Extractors in the Exivity GUI and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. For Azure EA:

• Pick Azure EA from the list

• Provide a name for the Extractor in the name field

• Click the Create button.

Once you've created the Extractor, go to first tab: Variables

Fill in all variables in above screenshot, and feel free to encrypt any sensitive data using the lock symbol on the right.

Once you've filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor for a single day:

The Extractor requires two parameters in yyyyMMdd format:

• from_date is the date for which you wish to collect consumption data

• to_date should be the date immediately following from_date

These should be specified as shown in the screenshot above, separated with a space.

When you click the Run Now button, you should get a successful result.

Configure Transformer

Once you have successfully run your Azure EA Blob Extractor, you can create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers in the Exivity GUI. Browse to this location and click the Create Transformer button. Make any changes that you feel necessary and then select the run tab to execute it for a single day as a test.

Create a Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Reports > Definitions:

Select the column(s) by which you would like to break down the costs. Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date range from the date selector shown when preparing the report.

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

Introduction

When deploying the Azure CSP Extraction template for Exivity, some configuration is required within your Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Potal. The following process must be completed in order to report on Azure CSP consumption:

1. Create a Partner Center Web Application

2. Configure Extractors for Azure CSP Usage, Billing & Ratecard

3. Configure Transformers

4. Create your Report

5. Create your Workflows

It is necessary to create independent Extractors/Transformers for the Usage and Billing, the Usage Extractors will be retrieving the data on a daily basis giving an estimation of your daily costs. The Billing Extractor will consolidate the rates based on the blended costs per service for the billing period.

Create a Partner Center Web Application

Perform the following to create the Azure AD configured to access the Partner Center API

• Browse to Partner Center, https://partnercenter.microsoft.com, and login using credentials that have admin agent and global admin privileges

• Click on the following Dashboard –> Account Settings –> App Management

• Click Add key to create a new Application Key for you App ID that can be used with Exivity.

• Go to the Billing section.

• Open the last month's invoice in pdf format.

• Take note of your billing period

Configure Extractors for Azure CSP Usage, Billing & Ratecard

Go into the Exivity GUI and browse to Data Sources -> Extractors. Then click on Create Extractor and you should get a list of templates. Unfold Azure CSP and pick the usage template:

After selecting the template, click the green Create button on the bottom right. Now make sure to give the new Extractor a name in field at the top:

Now click again on the green Create button at the bottom right. Then click on the Variables menu item:

Now make sure to fill in your Client ID, Secret and your onmicrosoft.com domain. When required, you can encrypt security sensitive field using the lock button on the right of each field. Once you are filling in these details, click the Update button.

Now test the Extractor by going into the Run tab and providing a from and to date like in this example:

Now click the Run Now button and confirm it works as expected:

Create a second extractor using the template Azure_CSP_Invoice_Extractor and give it a name.

This extractor uses the same variables in the Variables menu item as the previous extractor. You can now test the extractor by going to the Run tab, this script uses 3 arguments:

• Positive offset: Starting on 0, it will retrieve the most recent invoice, a 1 will retrieve the previous report, etc.

• Year of the report: Year of the report you want to retrieve.

• Starting day of the billing period: If your billing period goes from 22nd to 21st, the input will be 22.

After filling the arguments you can test the extractor by clicking in Run Now.

Finally, follow the same steps for the Azure Rate Card Extractor, this extractor does not need any arguments.

Configure Transformers

Once you have successfully run your Azure CSP Usage, Billing & Rate Card Extractors, you can create the Transformers templates via Data Sources -> Transformers in the Exivity GUI. Browse to this location and click the Create Transformer button. You will need to create two separate transformers using these two templates:

The Azure_CSP_Daily-Usage Transformer will transform the daily usage data and the Azure_CSP_End-of-Month Transformer will consolidate the usage with the final blended rates.

Make any changes that you feel necessary and then select the Run tab to execute it for a single day as a test.Make sure that when running the Transformer you select custom range in the drop-down menu labelled Run for and select the same day as for which you have extracted consumption data in the previous step.

Create a Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Reports > Definitions:

Select the column(s) by which you would like to break down the costs. Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date range from the date selector shown when preparing the report.

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

Create your Workflows

You may want to automate the CSP ETL process, you can achieve it by leveraging on the Exivity's Workflow capabilities. You will create two Workflows, one will run on a daily basis calculating the usage of your CSP subscriptions and the other one will run on a monthly basis to consolidate the service rates.

Start by browsing to Administration -> Workflows in the Exivity GUI and click on the +Create button.

Fill the Name and Description fields, in the SCHEDULES section configure the workflow to run on a daily basis at a convenient time.

In the STEPS section you can create as many steps as needed by adding them with the + button. For the first daily workflow, a minimum of 4 steps are required, two steps for the Usage and Ratecard extractors, one for the Transformer and one for the Report. Make sure to input the right FROM and TO date offsets. Click on Update to finish the creation of your first Workflow.

Create a second Workflow, fill the Name, and Description fields and configure the SCHEDULES section to run on a monthly basis, preferably 2 to 3 days after your month's billing period has finished. For the monthly workflow, a minimum of 3 steps are required, one step for the Billing extractor, one for the Transformer and one for the Report. Make sure to input the right FROM and TO date offsets (to cover the entire billing period) and arguments. Click on Update to finish the creating of the second Workflow.

Introduction

When deploying the Azure Stack Extraction template for Exivity, some configuration is required within your Azure Stack environment and a lookup file needs to be created. The following process must be completed in order to report on Azure Stack consumption:

1. Create an Exivity Enterprise Application in your Azure AD for authentication

2. Configure a rate card lookup file

3. Configure an Extractor

4. Configure a Transformer

5. Create your Report

Creating an Enterprise Application

In order for Exivity to authenticate with Azure Stack, you will need to create an application in the Azure AD where you have registered your Azure Stack management node:

When you create this application in your Azure AD make sure it has (at least) the Reader Role in your Default Provider Subscription:

Create a rate card

As Microsoft does not provide rate card information via the Azure Stack Consumption API you will only obtain usage metrics from Azure Stack for all of the Meter IDs that are mentioned here by Microsoft.

Exivity provides a template rate card that you can use for creating your own rates. Please bear in mind that these rates are fictional, thus you should update it with your preferred values. However to get started, you can use the file linked above by placing it as a csv file in your Exivity home folder at the following location:

%EXIVITY_HOME_PATH%\system\extracted\AzureStack\rates\azure_stack_example_rates.csv

Configure Extractor

To create the Extractor, browse to Data Sources > Extractors in the Exivity GUI and click the Create Extractor button. This will try to connect to the Exivity Github account to obtain a list of available templates. For Azure Stack:

• Pick Azure_Stack_Extractor_(App+Secret) from the list

• Provide a name for the Extractor in the name field

• Click the Create button.

Once you've created the Extractor, go to first tab: Variables

Fill in all required variables marked within the red box in above screenshot. If you don't know some of the required GUIDs, most of these can be obtained by browsing to the Azure Stack management node URL:

• https://adminmanagement.**<your.domain.com>**/metadata/endpoints?api-version=2015-01-01

Another way to obtain some of this information is using the Diagnostics button in your management portal:

When you click the Show Diagnostics link, it should download a JSON file containing most of the parameters you'll need, such as Provider GUID, Audience GUID etc.

Once you've filled in all details, go to the Run tab to execute the Extractor for a single day:

The Extractor requires two parameters in yyyyMMdd format:

• from_date is the date for which you wish to collect consumption data

• to_date should be the date immediately following from_date

These should be specified as shown in the screenshot above, separated with a space.

When you click the Run Now button, you should get a successful result.

Configure Transformer

Once you have successfully run your Azure Stack Extractor, you can create a Transformer template via Data Sources > Transformers in the Exivity GUI. Browse to this location and click the Create Transformer button. Make any changes that you feel necessary and then select the run tab to execute it for a single day as a test.

Create a Report

Once you have run both your Extractor and Transformer successfully create a Report Definition via the menu option Reports > Definitions:

Select the column(s) by which you would like to break down the costs. Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date range from the date selector shown when preparing the report.

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Invoices report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.

The Accounts report provides the ability to drill down into your metered based IT consumption costs. The way you've created your Report, determines on what values you can zoom into.

Once you've logged into the system, go to "Reports" > 'Accounts'. Here are a few key parameters you can use to define how your report is generated:

Date Selection

The date selector is important to limit the scope of data you're focusing on.

First select the date range you are interested in. This can be a single month, a 3-month time period, half a year, a full year, or a custom date range.

Report

Your Exivity solution can have more then one report configured. If this is the case, you will need to select the appropriate report containing the data you wish to examine. An end user will only see reports listed that they have permissions to, and the first of those is automatically selected.

Drill Down, Services & Report Depth

After selecting a date range and report you can start drilling down into your data in a number of ways:

1. Moving your mouse over one of the accounts will reveal a toolbar as shown above. For each account, you have the option to click on the Drilldown control in that toolbar. This will do the following:

   1. Descends one level deeper into the report

   2. Updates your view of the data to reflect that deeper level

   3. Sets the 'Parent' filter to the account you selected to drill down on

2. As well as the ability to drill down you can also view the Services associated with an account on any level of your report. Note that this will change your view from the Accounts report to the Services report.

The Services report provides the ability to report on your metered based IT consumption costs from a Services perspective.

Once logged into the system, go to Reports > Services. From here you will get a report grouped by the services consumed. This report can be refined using a number of filters.

Filters and Reporting Depth

Once you have selected your date range and report you can start viewing your data. By default it will show all consumed services for this report for the accounts you have permission to access. If you want to limit your view you can change the reporting 'Depth', and then apply additional filters such as:

• Category - to only view certain Service Categories

• Account - to limit your view to all services belonging to a certain account

When filtering the services for a specific account, it is recommended to start from the Accounts Report where you can drill down into a specific account. Once the account has been picked, switch the view to the services associated with that account using the buttons in the detailed report:

Report Caches

Version 2 introduces a breaking change to historical cached data from installations before version 2.0.0. Therefore, when you're upgrading an Exivity version 1 to version 2, all Reports will be automatically Unprepared during upgrade. After completing the upgrade, you will have to browse to your Report Definitions and Prepare each of them for the appropriate date period:

Changes to Transcript

As part of version 2, outdated syntax in your Transformers will be automatically converted to comply with version 2 Transcript syntax. Your version 1 Transformers will be backed up during upgrade into the default backup folder %EXIVITY_HOME_PATH%/system/backup. To manually upgrade any of your version 1 Transformers, you may use the script provided in %EXIVITY_PROGRAM_PATH%/update-transcript-v2.0.0.bat (this script will upgrade any Transformer currently available in the default Transformer folder).

Replacement of Exivity Eternity Service

the service that was previously responsible for scheduling and execution of workflows ("Exivity Eternity Service" which ran eternity.exe) has been replaced by the Aeon component and runs as the "Exivity Scheduling Service". In case the "Exivity Eternity Service" was running under a non-system account, ensure to update the newly registered "Exivity Eternity Service" with the corresponding user service credentials.

The Summary report provides a detailed breakdown of costs in an invoice-like format. The services defined in the system determine what you'll see here.

Once logged into the system, go to Reports > Summary. From here you're able to generate different kinds of detailed costs reports, which can be used for billing, chargeback and showback.

Filters and Reporting Depth

Once you have selected your date range and chosen which report you to activate will be presented with the summary cost report as shown above. By default it will show all consumed services for an account. As accounts are heirarchical, this view will include consumed services for all children of the selected account. Therefore it is important that you select an appropriate Depth when running this report.

Grouping and display of Instances

The Summary report has a few options that you can turn on and off. These options allow you to tune the amount of detail shown and the grouping applied to it:

If you want to include a detailed grouping of Services and Service Categories, then ensure that the Services checkbox is enabled. The same goes for including Instance level information. The latter enables you to view resource level consumption data, such as the Virtual Machine hostname, Container or User Name.

The services screen gives a user the ability to view and change the available services in the service catalogue of the Exivity deployment. When creating new services, it is required to use a Transformer with the or statement.

Obtaining details of a Service

To view the details of a service that has already been created, click on one of the services listed in the 'Services' > 'Overview' screen:

The numbered items from above screenshot refer to the following list:

1. The description or friendly name for this service

3. The time stamp when the service was created

4. The time stamp when the service was updated

5. The DataSet where this service relates to

6. Where to obtain the service name from (in header or in data). The value will be used for the service description (see 1)

7. The source column that has the consumed quantity

8. The Instance column refers to the chargeable instance column value (i.e. VM ID) which is required for automatic Services

9. The interval that defeines the frequency of how often this service is being charged. Meaning: automatic (every occurrence/record/hour), daily or monthly

10. When using proration, this checkbox will be enabled. Proration takes into account whether to charge for a portion of a consumption interval. For example: when having 10 days of consumption for a monthly service with a rate configured of € 90 per unit that has proration enabled, will result in a line item of € 30 for that services monthly charge

11. The Billing Type provides information whether this is a service that has manual (using manually provided, adjustable rate value) or automatic (using rate column) rates configured

12. COGS (Cost of Goods) of a service will have its own rate configuration, which can be either manual/automatic per unit or manual/automatic per interval

Changing or Deleting a Service

In case you need to change the configuration of an already populated service, the GUI enables you to do so. To change an existing service you will need to make sure that you have first selected the appropriate report from the Report Selector and the left top of the screen. To change the configuration or delete a service, you will then need to follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Services > Overview menu and click the white Edit button at the top of service list. The system will warn you that any changes made to existing service, may require you to re-Prepare the currently selected Report , found at Data pipelines > Reports.

2. If you have confirmed the warning message, you will be able to select one, multiple or all of the services within the currently selected Report . You can then select the Delete button next to the Edit button, to delete all selected services.

3. If you want to change the configuration of one of the services, you should first select the service which you'd like to change.

4. When you have the service that you want to change selected, you can change any of the available parameters such as the Instance Column, Interval, etc. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you may press the Update button.

5. Ensure to re-Prepare your Report in case you have made any changes.

Creating a Service

After confirmation of this warning message, the Create button is enabled:

Now it is possible to create a new service. Ensure to fill in all fields, since all fields are mandatory:

When your new service configuration satisfies your need, you may click the Create button.

Apply Metadata to Services

It is possible to define a budget on any level within your organisation. This enables different audiences to monitor costs across different clouds. It also enables any business owner to set thresholds informing customers, departments or project owners when they are reaching their configured budget.

Create a budget

In order to create a budget, navigate to Accounts > Budgets. Then click the Create button to create a new budget. In this menu, a couple of items are presented:

Global options

Global options apply on the entire budget, and aply to the following items:

• Interval: determine whether the budget is applied Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly

• Apply to: a configured budget is by default applied to the total Charge of the configured Interval. It is however also possible to create a budget which is applied to the Cost of Cogs (COGS) instead

Revisions

A budget configuration can potentially change year over year, and therefore it is possible to create different budget revisions. Each revision can have the following settings applied:

• Revision start date: the start Month, Quarter or Year for this budget revision

• Filter by: typically a budget is applied to a single or multiple Accounts. It is however possible to add additional filtering on Service or Service Category. By applying Service based filtering, it is possible to limit the scope for a configured budget

Accounts

When a budget is created, it is possible to set a budget money amount for one or multiple accounts. In case each account for which a budget is set, also has 1 or multiple levels of child accounts, it is possible to control how the budget 'trickles down' the organisational structure:

• Account selection: it is required to select an Account from any level in your Report Definition. It is the possible to set a budget value (i.e. $100000) in the grey box next to the Account.

  • The same applies to any Child Accounts for which you may set/overwrite a budget. You may add a Child Account to the list, by click the green button left of the account name

    • NOTE: a child account may also be excluded from a budget, by clicking the Exclude checkbox right of the name of the Account

• Remainder: using the Remainder drop-down it is possible to control the distribution of the budget towards child accounts. The two options to pick by default are:

  • even: each child account will get an even amount of budget. Example :Consider a top level account 'ACME Corp' with a monthly budget set of $100.000. When 'ACME Corp' has 10 child 'Business Unit' accounts , each of these 'Business Units' will get an even amount of the budget: In this case this will be $10.000.

  • shared: when the distribution of the remainer is set to shared, the consumption of child accounts is ignored. As long as the total spendings of all child accounts does not go beyond the configured budget. Example: Consider a top level account 'ACME Corp' with a monthly budget set of $100.000. When 'ACME Corp' has 10 child 'Business Unit' accounts , each of these 'Business Units' combined should not use more then $100.000.

  • none: the option to not distribute any remainders is only applicable when overriding the budget percentage for each child account. This means it is required set a distinct budget percentage manually for each child account.

Changing a budget

An existing budget can be changed by navigating to Accounts > Budgets, and then clicking the budget which you want to change.

Changing an existing budget revision

Once a budget has been saved, you will be unable to change the start date unless you edit the Budget Revision:

Once you have enabled edit mode for an existing Budget Revision, you will be able to change the start date:

After making these changes you will need to save these by click the blue checkbox on the right. You can also cancel your changed using the blue x-sign, or delete the revision by clicking the red recycle bin.

Adding a new budget revision

Similar to changing a Budget Revision, it is possible to add a new revision that holds a different start date with revised budget plan. To do this, you will need to click the green + sign:

Exivity enables you to create account specific rate adjustment policies. An adjustment policy allows you to apply a discount or a premium using one of these modifiers:

1. a certain amount of money (i.e. $ 100)

2. a certain quantity (i.e. 100 GB/hours)

3. a percentage (i.e. 10%)

This Adjustment can then be applied to a single service, multiple different services, or one or more service categories.

Create an Adjustment Policy

To create a new adjustment policy for an account, follow these steps:

1. From the menu on the left, select 'Services' > 'Adjustments'

2. Then select the Account from the list of accounts for which you want to create an adjustment policy

3. After selecting the account, click 'Add Policy', and provide a meaningful name for your policy in right screen where it says 'Adjustment name'

4. Provide the Start date, by selecting the initial month when this adjustment policy is applied

5. Provide the End date, by selecting the month when this adjustment policy will be discontinued. This is optional, since an adjustment policy can be applied permanently.

6. Select which Service or Service Category this policy is applied to. You are able to select multiple using the check boxes that are provided.

7. Select a Type for this adjustment. This can be either a Discount or a Premium

8. Select the Target, meaning: is this Adjustment targeting the total Charge or the total Quantity of the selected service(s)?

9. Select the Difference setting, to indicate an Absolute value (i.e. 100 units, or 100 dollars) or a Relative value (such as 10%)

10. Lastly provide the Adjustment value. In the example shown in the image above, there is a value of '10' provided in the Amount field, which will adjust the total charge with -10% given the provided parameters.

11. When you're done, click the Add Policy button. Your changes are now applied to all charge related reports.