Key Concepts

Overview

Perspectives in Harness CACM provide powerful cost analysis capabilities through customizable views of your cloud spending data. This guide covers the key concepts and features available in Perspectives.

Perspective Drilldown

• Total Cost: The total cost of the resources in the Perspective.

• Budget: The budget for the resources in the Perspective.

• Forecasted Cost: The forecasted cost of the resources in the Perspective.

• Recommendations: The recommendations for the resources in the Perspective.

Group By

You can create a Perspective for your resources using rules and filters. The filters are used to group the resources. The following are the supported filters:

• Cost Categories: You can create a perspective by filtering based on the cost categories you have created. To create cost categories, see Use Cost Categories.

• Region: Each AWS, GCP, or Azure region you're currently running services in.

• Product: Each of your active products with its cloud costs.

• Cloud Provider: Filter and group costs by the cloud service provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, or Kubernetes clusters) to analyze spending across different cloud platforms.

• Label: Each label that you assign to your AWS resources. You can select a label name to get more granular details of your label. For more information, go to Tagging your AWS resources. For tags to appear in the Perspective, you must activate the user-defined cost allocation tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. For more information, go to Activating User-Defined Cost Allocation Tags. CACM updates the tag keys as follows:

  • For the user-defined tags, user_ prefix is added.

  • For the AWS system tags, aws_ prefix is added.

  • The characters that do not follow regex [a-zA-Z0-9_] are changed to _.

  • The tags are case-sensitive. If the tags are specified as UserName and username, then the number suffix _<Number>is added to the tag. For example, UserName and username_1.

• Label V2: Preserves the original structure from AWS similar to how GCP, Azure and Cluster tags are stored. See Understanding the Difference: Label vs. Label V2 and Migrate from Label to Label V2.

Grouping Options by Data Source

CACM provides various grouping options to analyze your cloud costs based on different dimensions. Select the appropriate tab to view available grouping options for each cloud provider, container platform, or external data source.

Preferences

General Preferences

• Show Others: The default perspective graph displays only the top 12 cost items. Enable this option to group all remaining costs into an "Others" category, ensuring you see your complete spending picture.

• Show Anomalies: Highlight unusual spending patterns or sudden cost changes in your visualizations. This feature makes it easy to spot potential issues or unexpected charges that may require investigation. The number of anomalies are shown on the Group By graph in a red triangle.

• Show Negative Cost: Displays instances where discounts exceed the actual billing amount, resulting in negative cost values in your reports. Displays the negative cost with a dotted red bar and labels it as NegativeCost in the legend. To view it, please select "Group By" as None because in other Group Bys, it might not appear in the top 12 entries.

• Show Unallocated costs on clusters: In certain graphs, you may come across an item labeled as Unallocated. This entry is included to provide a comprehensive view of all costs. When you examine the Total Cost in the perspective, it encompasses the costs of all items, including the unallocated cost. This option is available only in perspectives with cluster rules. The Show "unallocated" costs on clusters option is only available in the chart when the Group By is using Cluster and the following options are selected:

  • Namespace

  • Namespace ID

  • Workload

  • Workload ID

  • ECS Task

  • ECS Task ID

  • ECS Service ID

  • ECS Service

  • ECS Launch Type ID

  • ECS Launch Type

Cloud-Based Preferences

• AWS Preferences

• GCP Preferences

• Azure Preferences

Dynamic Perspective Reports

What are Dynamic Perspective Reports?

Dynamic Perspective Reports are a new capability that allows you to generate, schedule, and manage cost reports directly from your Perspectives. Create reports from your perspectives to bookmark specific filter and grouping configurations. No need to rebuild the same view repeatedly just save it once and access it anytime. Reports dynamically include all relevant data columns based on your selected grouping criteria and filters. This ensures consistency between your interactive perspective view and exported reports.

Create Reports

View Saved Reports

1. Navigate to the specific Perspective you wish to create a report for.

2. Click the Download/Save as Report button in the upper-right corner of the Perspective view

Report Details

• Name: Provide a name for your report

• Group By: Select how data should be organized using available grouping options

• Time Period: Choose from Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, Last Month, or This Month

• Granularity: Select Daily, Weekly, or Monthly data points

• Filters: Apply specific filters to focus your report

• Data Columns: Customize which metrics and dimensions appear in your report. The system automatically suggests relevant columns based on your Group By selection, but you can add or remove specific data points to tailor the report to your requirements.

• Export Rows up to: Set maximum number of data rows to include

• Exclude rows with cost below: Optionally exclude rows below a specified cost value

Delivery Options:

• Scheduled Delivery: Set specific date and time for automated delivery and frequency (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly). You can add up to 50 recipient email addresses (comma-separated)

• Immediate Download: Download Perspective Chart data or Table data as CSV

IMPORTANT

• For previously created reports where **Group By settings, time range, or granularity were not available for reports, CACM automatically takes these parameters from the perspective. In these cases, the maximum export row limit defaults to 10,000 rows.

To view and manage all your saved reports: Navigate to Cloud Costs > Perspectives > Saved Reports

The Saved Reports page provides a comprehensive view of all your configured reports with the following options:

• Report Creation: Create new reports by clicking +New Report > Perspective

• Report Management: View information for each report including:

  • Report name and scheduled delivery frequency

  • Associated perspective

  • Time period selected for data

  • Creation and modification metadata

• Report Actions: You can:

  • Edit or Delete a report.

  • Subscribe or unsubscribe from scheduled deliveries.

Dynamic Cost Categories Toggle

The Dynamic toggle on the Perspective page gives you control over how cost category rules are applied to your cost data. It lets you balance real-time accuracy with faster performance.

Internal Working:

If Dynamic ON (Runtime Mode):

• Perspectives apply cost category rules as soon as the page loads (dynamically).

• Any recent changes to cost category rules (even from a few minutes ago) are reflected immediately.

• ⏱️ Load times may be slower since rules are processed at runtime.

If Dynamic OFF (Stored Data Mode):

• Harness CACM evaluates cost category rules during the daily data ingestion process and persists the results in a dedicated dataset. This optimized dataset contains pre-computed rule evaluations for the current month's cost data.

• When Dynamic Toggle is OFF, Perspectives use cost category rules from the stored dataset.

• This ensures ⚡ faster performance since stored data is used without any computations at runtime.

• Note that if in case, CACM's daily process of updating the dataset is still running, stored data is not available and only Dynamic ON (runtime calculation) is available and a message will be displayed on the UI to inform.

Label Migration: Label vs. Label V2

Harness CACM is transitioning from the traditional Label system to the enhanced Label V2 system. Support for the legacy Label system will be discontinued in the coming months.

• Label (Legacy): Normalizes AWS tags. GCP, Azure and Clusters tags are not normalized.

• Label V2 (New): Preserves the original structure from AWS similar to how GCP, Azure and Cluster tags are stored.

Key Benefits of Label V2:

• Original tags: Displays your original cloud tag keys exactly as they appear in AWS, Azure, or GCP

• Improved Performance: Enhanced data processing and query performance

After Label V2, AWS labels are stored as-is without any normalization.

Who Needs to Migrate?

✅ Migration Required

Label V2 will replace the current Labels in the next release. Harness CACM will automatically migrate your existing rules. However, if your scripts reference Labels in Perspectives or CCs, you’ll need to update them manually to use Label V2. Existing Labels will also continue to work without interruption

🆕 No Migration Needed

If you're a new user or haven't used Labels in your Perspectives, simply use Label V2 for all new configurations.

How to Migrate

Organize Perspectives using Folders

You can organize Perspectives by adding them to folders. The number of Folders that can be created is 2000.

Click New folder, name the folder, and then select the Perspectives you want to add.

You can also add a Perspective to a folder when you create it or move it to a folder when you edit it.