Kumoco Cloud Management Release Notes

Last Update: January, 2023

V5.0

Portal Interface

  • Professionally crafted by world-class designers who are experts in the ServiceNow platform, we think it is both beautiful and intuitive. Key information is presented on easy and quick to understand dashboard, letting you know what your top priority actions are.

Google Cloud Platform: New Resources & Recommendations

  • Technology moves quickly and we are keeping pace. To help manage your GCP accounts, KCM now explores IaaS resources and a variety of SaaS/PaaS type resources likes BigQuery, CloudRun, DataFlow, Kubernetes, and Spanner, providing usage analysis and recommendations to reduce costs.

Enhanced Universal Tag Management

  • Our tagging engine has been overhauled and tuned up, provided the ability to apply tags based on logic at any level you require, including groups of cloud accounts and resource types.

Dashboards & Reports

  • Dozens of standard reports have been packaged into KCM and are ready to use without any additional configuration or setup to use them. Interactive filters have been added to most dashboards, benefitting your already-configured cost allocations.

Forecast Expense Lines & Projections

  • KCM already retrieves all of your GCP, AWS, and Azure billing data and enables you to combine and allocate costs as required from multiple accounts and providers. Now, those combined and allocated costs include forecast projections. Updated automatically each day when cost data is retrieved, you can explore projected future spend based on previous spending trends in the breakdowns and allocations that define your organisation. Want to know the projected spend for a specific cost centre or business unit based on its consumption for the last quarter? No problem, you will have updated forecasts every day, including alerts if the forecast is going to exceed budget thresholds.

Azure Virtual Machines: Automated Scheduling, End of Lease Termination, and Custom Script Execution

  • Managed centrally through KCM, on/off schedules for Azure Virtual Machines can be set for individual and groups of resources, including existing virtual machines. Standard schedules can be configured and enforced, ensuring cost-effective policies are applied and maintained.
  • Automatic ‘end of lease’ termination ensures resources do not stick around and incur costs longer than they should, either for internal or external users. By setting a end-of-life date for a virtual machine, the resource owner will be notified in advance and have the opportunity to request an extension or simply let the resource be terminated at the scheduled time.
  • You can now remotely send and execute scripts to virtual machines directly from KCM. Allow your users to either execute scripts from a standard library or to provide their own scripts, optionally saving them for future.

Domain Separation Support

  • KCM now runs on domain separated environments. Meeting all the requirements defined by ServiceNow for domain separation, KCM can be installed, configured, and operated in domain separation environments, providing platform-level security to all our MSP-focused features and functionality. For customers not running domain separation that still need confidence in database-level security, KCM now also offers the option to turn on ‘Data Segregation’, ensuring every database call from KCM passes through ACLs according to your required security structure.

Automated Cloud Account Setup

  • KCM and ServiceNow conduct an immense amount of activity to give you the cloud management capabilities you expect and setting all of that up can be time consuming. We have now automated all the setup and configuration actions when added a new cloud account, saving human effort time and getting your account up and running in the same day.

Azure CSP and Non-Enterprise Billing

  • We now support all Azure account types: Enterprise Agreement, CSP, and Non-Enterprise (standard). With this complete support for Azure billing data, MSPs can provide cost visibility to your CSP customers, as well as combine and/or allocate costs from Enterprise Agreement and/or reseller accounts.

Performance Enhancements

  • Dozens of performance optimisations have been made throughout KCM, primarily aimed at improving two key areas: faster processing and loading of data from cloud accounts, and distribution of processing jobs. These improvements leverage capabilities at the ServiceNow platform level like managing transaction queues and limits, worker allocation, and MID Server utilisation. Specific to the front end, pre-calculated and prepared views are aimed at providing faster load times—in some cases, loading times for pages with large data sets have improve from minutes to a few seconds.

V4.2

New features and functionality

  • Added support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
    • Automated orchestration to Resize and Terminate virtual machines based on recommendations and metrics
    • Support for CIS (Centre of Internet Security) compliance auditing
    • Added Billing support
  • Universal Tag Management
    • Introducing universal tag management engine
    • Manage tags across all of your accounts and providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, VMWare), ensuring consistency and continuity
    • Existing tags are discovered, treated as authoritative, and maintained

V4.0

New features and functionality

  • VMWare support for reclaim (rightsizing) and cluster consolidation
  • VMWare support for CIS (Centre for Internet Security) compliance auditing
  • VMWare support for standard features and functionality, including automation and ITSM integrations AWS and Azure provider price comparison recommendations
  • Various dashboard updates and performance improvements
  • Additional Azure PaaS/SaaS resources included
  • Compliance support added for Azure MSSQL and PostgreSQL
  • Various performance enhancements for data job processing for metrics, recommendations, rightsizing, and billing

V3.0

New features and functionality

  • Budget Forecasting based on fiscal calendar
  • Budget Thresholds with dynamic target and automatic alerts
  • Reserved Instances savings and coverage dashboard
  • ITSM integration for Runbooks
  • Maintenance engine with schedules
  • ISO Standard guided setup

V2.0

New features and functionality

  • Compliance engine released, enabling automated auditing and remediation against the CIS (Cloud Internet Security) standard’s 125 requirements
  • Exploration (‘discovery’) of additional data at cloud account and resource levels to enable auditing and remediation with respect to compliance
  • Exploration (‘discovery’) of additional cloud resources, particularly PaaS and SaaS types
    • Cloud Formation (AWS)
    • Container Instances (Azure)
    • DynamoDB (AWS)
    • Elastic Beanstalk (AWS)
    • Elastic IPS (AWS)
    • OpsWorks Chef Servers (AWS)
    • EMR Clusters (AWS)
    • Kubernetes Clusts (AWS & Azure)
    • Lambda Functions (AWS)

Enhancements

  • Additional discovery of Azure Classic Services: parent-level CMDB class which includes existing Azure Classic

V1.0

New features and functionality

  • Automated orchestration to Resize and Terminate AWS, Azure Classic, and Azure Gen2 virtual machines based on recommendations
  • Workflow capabilities to Stop, Start, and Restart virtual machines, both independently and part of Resize and Terminate automation
  • Workflows to implement and roll-back Resize and Terminate from recommendation tasks
  • Exploration (‘discovery’) of available virtual machine sizes for AWS, Azure Classic, and Azure Gen2 virtual machines, supporting automated resize
  • ‘Roll’ action now available for AWS and Azure Spot Groups
  • Discovery of AWS organisational/child accounts for purposes of billing

Enhancements

  • Improved business logic for generating recommendation tasks
  • Direct Billing Configurations now support AWS Cloud Service Accounts
  • Chained API transactions are now tracked and enhanced with capability to scale scheduler workers
  • Cloud Manager usage reports
  • Madrid certification