Commitments

Learn how to use the Commitments page to track your coverage, your savings, and the health of every commitment.

The Commitments page is where you see how much of your cloud spend is covered, what that coverage saves you, and how each commitment is performing. It also shows what is queued to be purchased, and how your coverage and savings have moved over time.

You can also purchase additional coverage from this page. See Purchasing Coverage for details.

Adjust Coverage

• Adjust Coverage opens the coverage simulation, where you set your coverage policy and buy additional coverage. See Purchasing Coverage for more details.
• The Autobot and Flexbot pills show whether Autobot and Flexbot are currently active on your account.
• Plan narrows the page to one commitment plan. By default the page loads scoped to Compute Savings Plans.

Current Coverage and Projection

This section shows your coverage today, and how it is projected to change.

Four figures sit above the chart:

• Savings, what your commitments saved over the selected range. A selector on this tile allows you to see savings from Flexbot, Autobot, or the total.
• Available Savings, the additional savings per month you could still capture on this plan. North works this out over a window sized to that plan's own spend pattern, rather than a fixed number of days.
• Coverage, the share of your on-demand equivalent spend that a commitment covers.
• ESR, your Effective Savings Rate. See Metric Definitions below for details.

Set the range with the 30d, 60d, 90d and Custom controls. Set the granularity to hourly, daily, or monthly.

North gives you several different visualizations to see your coverage data.

• Simple: The Simple view charts covered spend against uncovered spend over the selected range, with your projected coverage drawn over it.
• Inventory: The Inventory view charts the commitments you hold, forward from today. Use the period control to move the window backward or forward twelve months at a time. Three types of inventory charts are available:

  • Commitment windows draws one band per commitment, stacked. The total steps down as each commitment expires. Each band is sized by the on-demand equivalent it covers, and a deeper shade is a three-year term. Hover a band for the price paid.
  • Stacked timeline charts the same inventory over time.
  • Ranked horizontal bars ranks the inventory by size.

Commitments Health

This section lists every commitment held in your account. It includes both commitments held by you as well as by North for you. Click Expand to open the list.

For each commitment, the list includes the identifier, the commitment type, the service it covers, its utilization, ESR, cost/hr, savings, the term, and expiry date. Click any row to see more details about the commitment.

• By default the list includes commitments for all services. Use the Commitment Type filter to narrow the list.
• If you want to look at your commitments with low utilization, use the Underutilized Commitments filter.
• You can also narrow the list to commitments that are about to expire using the Expiration Window filters.
• Use the date range filters to filter the list by the month the commitments were purchased.

Pending & Forecasted

This table lists commitments that are queued to be purchased, and commitments North forecasts buying for you.

• North generates new recommendations every month, so this table changes as each month's set is decided.
• Each row shows the coverage profile, the commitment type, and the service. It also shows the date you authorized it, the purchase date, the status, and the expected savings.
• Once North purchases a commitment, its associated record from this table moves to the Commitments Health table above it.
• This is also where you can cancel a request for a Flex purchase. Autobot purchases cannot be canceled - instead you must turn off Autobot to prevent future purchases against your policy.

Analytics

This section shows trends for your coverage and your savings over a range you select. Set the range with the 3M, 6M, 12M and Custom controls, and set the granularity to hourly, daily, or monthly.

Each card states whether the figure is an average or a total across the range.

• ESR, your Effective Savings Rate.
• North Flex Savings, savings from commitments North holds for you.
• North Auto Savings, savings from commitments Autobot purchased into your own account.
• On Demand Spend, spend that no commitment covered.
• North Utilization, how much of the commitments North manages is being used.
• Coverage, the share of your on-demand equivalent spend that a commitment covers.

Metric Definitions

• Utilization is how much of one commitment is being used. It is not the share of your environment that commitments cover. Utilization tells you how effectively you are using what you already committed to.
• Effective Savings Rate (ESR) is your blended discount across committed and on-demand spend. North calculates it after any Enterprise Discount Plan (EDP) or other negotiated pricing. If you have negotiated pricing with your cloud provider, ESR reflects your savings measured against that negotiated rate.