Scoped Views

Tutorial - Scoped Views for users with "Regular User" role

Tutorial - Scoped Views for users with "Owner" role (administrators)

It's often the case you want to create and persist a well defined view of your cloud costs. Perhaps the view is at a line of business, product line or team level composed of Ternary custom labels or vendor defined labels. You then want to apply views to one or more users in your organization and you want the views to persist, but give the users flexibility to disable the view or apply a different view. And there are times when you want to empower users to create their own personal views. We hear you, and very excited to bring you Scoped Views. As a Ternary organization administrator or regular Ternary user, creating and managing Scoped Views is easy, powerful and flexible.

As a Ternary administrator, you will find a new Scoped Views admin feature in the Admin page.

Click the 'Create Scoped View' button to build your first Scoped View

Give your scoped view a name that your users will see (and understand), define your scoped view filter/s based on one or more Ternary custom labels or cloud vendor billing labels/dimensions. Note, these filters will be evaluated as 'AND' logic.

You have 3 options, for applying scoped views to users within your organization. All 3 have slightly different behavior and use-cases outlined below:

"Available For": Adding a user to this list, they will see the scoped view available to them in their "Org Level Scoped Views" on any page that currently supports scoped views. The scoped view will not be applied when they log in but they can apply or remove the scoped view at their discretion
"Enforced For": Adding a user to this list will force the scoped view to be applied and the user cannot remove it. They will still be able to create personal scoped views but it will not go outside the boundaries of the scoped view filters you created and enforced for the user.
"Enabled by Default For": Adding a user to this list will apply the scoped view, by default, any time the user logs into the Ternary platform. In contrast to enforced scoped views, where the user cannot remove the scoped view, a user is able to toggle the default scoped view on and off.
"Strictly Enabled For": Adding a user to this list is similar to Enforced For but will use OR logic when 2 Scoped Views are applied. For example, if a user has Scoped View 1 and Scoped View 2 applied they will see data for both SV1 and SV2 with the ability to toggle off SV1 or SV2 to see just spend for either Scoped View in isolation. This is slightly different than Enforced For which would use AND logic.

You can select individual users from the associated drop-down list to assign a particular view to each user. Once you assign a user, to one of the 3 options, they will be removed from subsequent lists for assignment.

To review a comprehensive list of users assigned to each option you can navigate to the options table at the bottom. You can also remove users from each list via the X icon.

There are 2 additional options that are important to understand when assigning users to scoped views:

Apply to New Users: By enabling this, any new user created in the Ternary platform will have the scoped view either Available, Enforced or Enabled by Default.
Apply to All Users: By selecting this, all current users in the Ternary platform will have the scoped view either Available, Enforced or Enabled by Default.

Once you have created the scoped view, and applied it to users in your organization, you can see how each behaves for the assigned user below.

Available For:

Enhanced For:

Enabled by Default For:

Your scoped view indicator will change color based on views enabled or disabled

No Scoped view applied (grey)

Organization or Personal scoped views applied (blue)

Organization or Personal scoped views disabled or muted (red)

Similar to organization scoped views, you can create a personal scoped view. Swing over to your Ternary profile 'Settings' page to build your first personal scoped view.

Scoped Views Applicability

Today, you can apply scoped views to these Ternary features

Home
Reporting Engine Dashboards
Reporting Engine Reports
Cost Reports

We will add support for other features in follow-on scoped views releases.

Use Cases

Creating flexible aggregations of projects, services, or labels

You would like to flexibly build include/exclude logic to incorporate multiple dimensions into a single collection. The example shown below excludes a cloud label indicating shared services, includes a label of ‘cluster’ contains ‘bigco’, and also includes a set of specific projects

Steps: Once you enter a name for a new Scoped View, the process is simply one of building the criteria you want to consider. It is possible to build combinations that result in a ‘null’ set, in which case you will see ‘No Data to Display’ in reports and dashboards when the view is applied.

Enabling re-use of ‘generic’ dashboards and reports by application of Scoped Views

You would like to build a layout of data for each of my DevOps leaders that focuses on the projects they control. I don’t want to have to re-build the dashboard for each, rather I would like to master one, and have it show different data based on the user who is logged in.

Steps

Build the report templates using no filters other than those that will apply to all users. Keep them generic like ‘Compute Costs by Family’, ‘Spending by Category Before Credits’, etc. You don’t want to apply filters at this point because that will be accomplished via the Scoped Views
Now add in your scoped views for things which will span all of those reporting categories. These can be based on account or project id’s, labels on cloud assets, or even labels defined in Ternary.

Make sure that they can work in tandem with your reports. For example, this would make a good combination: “Cost by Project” with a Scoped View of “Projects for Team A”. A bad example would be: “Cost by Project” with a Scoped View of “Services with Credits”. The latter would likely produce no results since credits typically don’t get applied to individual projects.

Example of a Team Leader Dashboard with no Scoped View Applied

Now, by applying one of the Scoped Views, you can focus that generic Team Leader dashboard for just the ‘Astronauts’ team, which accounts for around half of the overall spend.

Or ‘Rocketeers’, which is a smaller team with fewer projects

Blending costs across cloud providers

Sometimes you would like to consider costs across multiple cloud providers without getting hung up on the specifics of each of their bills - projects in GCP vs accounts in AWS, a resource label in GCP vs an asset tag in AWS. Ternary can help with that.

Once your billing data has been loaded into the platform, check to see what native dimensions are in the data. You will certainly have project ids and account numbers. But will you have labels or tags? That will depend on your current DevOps practices.

Often the labeling will be less than perfect. For example, your AWS standard might be to use camelcase tags like ClientBillingRollup, while your standard on GCP might be lowercase acronyms like cbr or client_billing_rollup. In order to show those costs together, I would like to normalize on one standard without having to go back and re-label everything

Steps

Each Cloud in your data will have its own unique identifier. For each cloud, you will want to take the ‘native’ dimension - perhaps a GCP label in Cloud 1 and an AWS tag in Cloud 2 - and map them to the same key/value pair.

Choose the cloud to which you will be applying the label

Select the existing label key and value, map to the custom label and value in Cloud 1

Now do the same for Cloud 2, being careful to use the same custom label key and value

As long as they match exactly, your data can be stitched together as you see below. Notice that the cloud-provider column (another custom label, created in the same way) makes it clear where the particular applications were running.