Creating a positive user experience is always one of the most important goals our teams focus on. Whether it’s administrators working behind the scenes on the platform, or users looking to uncover cost savings opportunities in Explorer, or engineers working with our APIs, we always strive to provide a frictionless experience making sure each person has the right information to achieve their goals in our platform. That’s why our team spent much of the month of August building and releasing enhancements to current features, all aimed at providing an improved user experience.
But that goal of providing all the necessary information to achieve your goals doesn’t just stop at our platform enhancements. This month we also rolled out CloudZero Academy, a comprehensive suite of self-service learning resources purpose-built for CloudZero customers.
This resource includes interactive tutorials, expert-led webinars, and more. Whether you’re looking to refine your skills, explore advanced features, or seek guidance during our customer office hours, CloudZero Academy will help you get the most possible value out of your partnership with CloudZero.
Without further ado, read below to learn about the most notable features and enhancements our team has rolled out in the past month.
Seamless SSO
What it is: We’ve made a number of improvements that make the user experience when logging in via single-sign on (SSO) much more seamless. When using SSO previously, users would still have to manually enter their credentials in order to login to the CloudZero platform. With these enhancements, that friction point has been removed from the experience, allowing users to go straight from their identity provider or a deep link in the CloudZero platform without ever having to manually enter credentials. For more details on how to connect CloudZero to your identity provider, please review our documentation here.
Customer value: While it was a minor friction point, these enhancements now provide the expected, streamlined experience that is expected when using SSO.
Status: Generally Available
User Groups Enhancements
What it is: We’ve continued to make improvements to User Groups, our role-based access control feature in the CloudZero platform.
First, we’ve updated the user interface that admins use to create and edit a user group, including adding new explanatory text to describe access levels, a link to public documentation directly from the page, and updates to the filter experience. All of this is intended to make it easier than ever for new admin to get started with creating user groups in the CloudZero platform.
In addition, we’ve improved the experience for users who have limited access to data based on their assigned user group. Now, all users (regardless of data limitations) can see all dropdown options for Views in the Explorer to toggle between different view filters. If the user selects a view that contains data they don’t have access to, the user will be able to select the view but will only see data that their Group provides access to.
This enhancement allows users to take advantage of all the views available in their environment while still maintaining the security and privacy benefits provided by Groups. You can learn more about getting started with User Groups by viewing our documentation here.
Customer value: Both administrators and users now have an improved experience when leveraging the Groups functionality, making it simpler for your team to navigate the platform in an effective and secure manner.
Status: Generally Available
Resource Summary
What it is: We have added a Resource Summary as the default view when you drill all the way down in the Explorer page in the CloudZero console. This view will improve user experience by grouping together and providing high-level details for similar and/or related resources (such as EKS clusters).
Along with making it quicker and easier to get an overview of a set of resources, this change will also improve performance and load times for customers with very large or complex environments.
Customer value: Customers can now get a quick overview of similar or related resources without having to sift through details of each individual resource, both speeding up human analysis and performance of the CloudZero console.
Status: Generally Available
Telemetry API Improvements
What it is: We’ve rolled out improvements to our Telemetry API aimed at providing more useful information when users are assigning targets or associated costs to new telemetry streams. The system now offers suggestions for custom dimension names if the original name doesn’t align with the format the API expects it to be.
For example, if a user has a dimension name formatted as it would be in CostFormation, we can suggest the correct one based on the display name:
- custom:CZServices will suggest custom:CZ Services or custom:newAwsService will suggest custom:Test – AWS CE Service
Suggestions will also be offered based on case insensitive matches.
- custom:cz services will suggest custom:CZ Services
In addition, we’ve also added a new API endpoint to allow users to view the current state of a telemetry stream, as well as additional information on the Telemetry page to indicate how long it will take for data to be available for use in the CloudZero console.
Customer value: All of these improvements provide users with helpful status updates and suggestions that will help set expectations and minimize minor errors that could cause frustration when setting up our Telemetry API.
Status: Generally Available
Check out these updates the next time you’re using CloudZero. If you’re not already a CloudZero user, schedule a demo today to see which of our many features will suit your business or organization.
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The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
