As a business it is imperative that you view and reconcile your invoices as quickly as possible at the start of each month.  Now, with our Proforma Invoices, you can see your invoices prior to official issuance.  

They allow you to:

• Preview your invoice settings and billing information.
• Review your estimated bill before receiving the actual invoice.
• Contact us if you want to update any of the billing information you see before we issue your final invoice.
• Enjoy greater transparency and control over your billing process.

You can access proforma invoices up until we issue your final invoice. Once we issue your final invoice, you can’t see proforma invoices any longer.

To access proforma invoices:

1. Log in to the DoiT Console.
2. Navigate to Billing and then, select Invoices.
3. In the Status dropdown, select Proforma to view all your proforma invoices.

To learn more about proforma invoices check out our Help Center documentation, or raise a support ticket to speak with one of our experts.

announcement 

We've rolled out a significant update to the filtering and grouping features within our reporting tools that should simplify and expedite your cloud cost and usage reporting journey.

Direct Search Input

You can now enter any service name, SKU, or label value directly into the filter or group-by fields. The system automatically identifies and applies the appropriate category for your input to your report settings. This eliminates the need to manually search through categories or remember specific taxonomy distinctions like "EC2" for Services versus "ComputeSP" for SKUs.

Label Matching

For label values, the need to specify the corresponding label key is removed. Inputting a value such as "production" or "matt_k" is enough; our system will match it to the correct key. This reduces the overhead of knowing exact label structures and speeds up the configuration process.

In the example above, we are grouping the cost directly by selecting label values starting with "alloydb-proxy"

Selection Count Display

Both filter and group-by widgets now show the number of items you've selected. This feature provides immediate feedback on the scope of your reports and assists in managing complex data sets.

Availability:

Available to customers on all DoiT Cloud Navigator tiers, including Standard, Enhanced, Premium and Enterprise.

Given the nature of upfront payments for AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) – as well as the application of these discounts via DoiT Flexsave – calculating the amortization of these fees alongside the rest your cloud resource usage can lead to confusion when analyzing your cloud billing data. 

To overcome this, DoiT is happy to announce the availability of Amortized Costs and Amortized Savings as new metrics when analyzing your AWS data. You can select either of these metrics when creating reports in the Cloud Navigator console, which will spread out the upfront and recurring charges over the relevant time period to give you a more accurate picture of the effective daily costs of the workloads running in your AWS environment. This allows you to better predict future expenses, make budgeting decisions, and analyze the effectiveness of your savings strategies.

To learn more about DoiT’s Amortized Cost and Amortized Savings metrics, including a breakdown of how each applies to the different types of commitments and other discount mechanisms like Flexsave and Spot usage, check out our Help Center documentation, or raise a support ticket to speak with one of our experts.

Now, in the Notification Center, users with access to Invoices now have the ability to configure alerts based on specific billing profiles.

This tool expands our reach, allowing anyone with the appropriate permissions to subscribe to invoice alerts, and empowering you to make it easier to separate the noise from what's relevant.

Today, with our latest update, you can customize your experience to meet your specific needs, gaining granular control over the invoice notifications you receive. This enhancement enables you to selectively reduce noise and focus on the most relevant invoices by choosing the billing profile you wish to follow up on.

To learn more about configuring notifications for invoices by billing profile in DoiT's Navigator Notification Center, check out our Help Center.

Sincerely,
Product Team

We're thrilled to announce that DoiT now fully supports the Parquet format for ingesting Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data, alongside CSV. Parquet's efficiency in storage and data import can sometimes make it a preferred choice for our customers, reducing cloud storage fees due to its compact size and streamlining the import process.

Moving forward, customers have the flexibility to seamlessly send their CUR data in either Parquet or CSV format, empowering them to choose the option that best suits their needs.

We're happy to introduce the DoiT Invoice Explainer, an innovative tool to revolutionize how you view and understand your AWS Cloud spend invoices. This advancement underscores our dedication to providing unmatched services to you, our DoiT Cloud Advantage customers, making us the first in the industry to offer such a cutting-edge resource. 

Navigating the complexities of cloud billing can often be challenging, especially when dealing with two invoices: one from AWS to DoiT and another from DoiT to you. Each has its unique layout and pricing strategy, potentially leading to confusion.

That's where the Invoice Explainer steps in. Designed as a straightforward, guided journey, it simplifies these invoices by breaking down key components such as usage, savings plans, support costs, and discounts. This will drastically cut down the time you spend trying to understand your billing, transforming it into a seamless and transparent process. This initiative is part of our ongoing effort to enrich your experience with us, ensuring that every aspect of our service, including billing, is straightforward and hassle-free. Welcome to a new era of billing clarity with DoiT. To get started with this tool, please follow the instructions on our documentation.  

Cost optimization within the Cloud Navigator console just got a whole lot easier with the release of DoiT Insights. Using our powerful Cloud Analytics engine, Insights is regularly analyzing your cloud billing data to uncover savings opportunities, and enriching it with DoiT's extensive cloud expertise to generate actionable recommendations.

Located under the Governance tab on your Cloud Navigator toolbar, Insights continuously updates as new savings opportunities arise, which can range anywhere from architectural improvements, workload rightsizing, storage optimization, and more. 

From the Insights dashboard, you can see an overview of each opportunity and an estimate of how much it will save you. Clicking into each card will provide you with more information about how to take action, as well as a breakdown of how the potential savings are calculated. You can also raise a support ticket directly from the Insights screen to enlist a DoiT expert for more information, or help with any actions that you want to take.

To learn more about DoiT Insights and how they can help advance your FinOps and cost optimization practices, check out this interactive tour, read our Help documentation, or reach out to your DoiT account team.

We've made improvements to our Pulse Dashboard to provide better insight into your cloud spend by decoupling marketplace charges from the rest of your cloud spend:

- We adjusted the "Historical Cloud Native Costs by Platform" widget (previously "Historical Costs & Forecast") to exclude Marketplace charges and therefore provide a more accurate forecast.

- We added a new widget, "Historical Marketplace Purchases by Platform" to better identify and track your Marketplace charges for each provider.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Notification Center, available to all customers starting today.

The Notification Center centralizes and simplifies notification management, delivering critical information through your preferred communication channels.

Managing notifications can be overwhelming, especially when trying to ensure the right people are notified at the right time. As cost management in the Cloud becomes increasingly sensitive, many of you have found immense value in features like Cost Anomalies, Budgets, Alerts, Daily Digest, and Credit & Quota Utilization. These tools are instrumental in detecting potential cost-issues and reacting in time, and our Notification Center proactively brings these services to your attention, helping to separate signal from the noise.

With the Notification Center, you can manage both Slack and email notifications across all of the features supported today. In addition, it provides a place to integrate and manage additional endpoints to allow key insights to reach the right people at the right time.

Now you can send our notifications to multiple public and shared Slack channels. But, if you prefer email, you can also send notifications to multiple email addresses, regardless of whether the user received an invitation to DoiT Navigator.

Currently, we support email and Slack, but we plan to add more providers soon. Stay tuned for more updates from us!

To learn more about the new Cloud Navigator Notification Center and how to set up your own alerts, you can view this interactive demo, or read about it in the DoiT Help Center. 

We’re excited to announce that you can now view and use asset tags to filter through your AWS and GCP assets.

Previously, you had to open individual assets to see and manage their tags, which wasn’t a great experience if you had hundreds of projects or accounts. With this change, you can see the asset tag by default as a new column in the Assets page for AWS accounts, GCP partner billing, and GCP projects. If you don’t want to use the asset tag column, you can remove it by editing the columns of the Assets page.

You can also use the asset tag column as a filter to update the list view. When you don’t have any asset tags available, you’ll see a dash (-) in the list view, which you can use to filter them out. 

We’re confident that this will allow you to filter and manage your assets for AWS and GCP in a much more efficient way.