Beam Overview

Beam is a Cost Governance SaaS product offering by Nutanix that helps cloud-focused organizations to gain visibility into cloud spend across multiple cloud environments.

The following are a few of the key functionalities that help you with the cost management:

• Provides you with deep visibility and rich analytics detailing cloud consumption patterns.

• One-click cost optimization across your cloud environments.

• Proactively identifies idle and underutilized resources, and delivers specific recommendations to resize infrastructure services and ensure optimal cloud consumption.

Beam provides the following capabilities:

• Visibility into cloud consumption: Provides businesses with deep visibility into their multi-cloud consumption at an aggregate and granular level. Beam also automatically identifies cost anomalies to ensure cloud operators can immediately identify when spending deviations happen.

• Optimization of Cloud Consumption: Provides cloud operators with a one-click feature and optimization recommendations to easily right-size cloud resources. Beam uses machine intelligence to continuously suggest optimal purchase plans for reserved instances that drive deep cost savings.

• Control over Cloud Consumption: Helps you to set policies that continuously maintain high levels of cloud cost efficiency by automating various cost-saving actions. You can also create budgets for various teams or projects, track the spending against allocated budgets, and get alerts when a budget exceeds.

Cost Management for Nutanix On-Prem

Beam application enables you to take control of your cloud spend on the Nutanix on-premises resources. The application supports Nutanix enterprise cloud deployments to extend cost visibility capability into the multi-cloud cost governance portfolio.

Beam provides cost visibility into the on-premises clusters and resources. The costs are modeled to reflect the true cost of owning an on-prem infrastructure including Nutanix hardware, software, facilities, administration, and so on. The holistic cost visibility helps you to understand and control the overall cost associated with the Nutanix private cloud environment.

Nutanix cost management supports the following features.

• True cost of running on-premises infrastructure with the help of a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model.

• Metering and cost visibility of Nutanix clusters and resources on a daily and monthly granularity.

• Enable financial governance by creating chargeback reports and budget alerts.

• Nutanix hardware and software renewal recommendations.Note: Nutanix on-prem integration tracks the cost of Nutanix software and does not have a dependency on the type of the hypervisor (AHV or other supported hypervisors) running in your environment.

The application obtains the purchase and consumption data from Nutanix sales databases, MyNutanix Portal account, and Pulse.

Note: The historical spend reported in Beam is delayed by at least 48 hours. The billing data depends on the Nutanix Insights data pipeline which takes around 48 hours to update.

Multicloud Views

Apart from providing cost visibility and optimization recommendations for individual clouds, the application also provides cost visibility and optimization recommendations for entities with multiple clouds (AWS, Azure, and Nutanix). You can configure two types of multicloud entities - Financial and Scope.

Financial is a hierarchical structure comprising of Business units and Cost Centers used for Chargeback. Chargeback allows you to group cloud resources across multiple clouds (AWS, Azure, and Nutanix) within Cost Centers and Business units. By design, a cloud resource cannot be part of different cost centers or business units. For more information, see Chargeback.

Scope is a custom resource group with resources across multiple clouds (AWS, Azure, and Nutanix). Scopes are useful in providing visibility to logical resource groups like applications, project teams, cross-functional initiatives, and so on. Hence, by design, a cloud resource can be part of multiple Scopes. For more information, see Scopes.

• User Interface Layout
  This section provides information on the layout and navigation of the Beam console.

• Administration and User Management

• Starting Beam Free Trial
  Beam is a multi-cloud cost governance SaaS product that provides a free, full-featured, 14-day trial period. During the free trial period, you can configure your Nutanix On-premises and public cloud accounts (AWS and Azure ) in Beam to evaluate the features. It takes about 15 minutes to configure your cloud accounts in Beam.

• Onboarding Nutanix Account
  You can add your Nutanix account in Beam application. The application allows you to track your cloud expenses, optimize your cloud cost, and achieve visibility into your spend.

• Beam Gov(US) Cost Governance
  Beam Gov(US) is an isolated instance running in AWS GovCloud (US) region to cater specific regulatory compliance requirements of the US government agencies at federal, state, and local levels, government contractors, educational institutes, and other US customers who run sensitive workload in AWS GovCloud and Azure Government Cloud, and want to bring Cost Governance for their cloud infrastructure, gain visibility, optimize and control their spend. Beam Gov(US) provides a single plane consolidated view for Cost Governance.

• Getting Started With Configurations

• Nutanix Cost Configuration
  Beam allows you to define configuration settings for your cloud cost data. Cost Configuration is a set of rules that allow you to update cost inputs manually, and also select cost presentation options, allocation model options, and reporting rules that define how the cost of cloud resources get reported in Beam.

• Dashboard (Nutanix)
  The dashboard for Nutanix displays informational widgets for ease of cost governance.

• Cost Analysis (Nutanix)
  Beam provides a detailed view of the existing spend on Nutanix resources based on the deployed clusters and purchased products.

• Cost Reports
  Beam generates a report to track cost consumption across all your Nutanix accounts. The report contains detailed spend information for clusters including spend at a VM level within each cluster.

• Chargeback

• Budget

• Scopes
  A scope is a logical group of your cloud resources that provides you with a custom view of your cloud resources. You can define scopes using cloud, accounts, and tags. The administrator can assign read-only access to a user. The user gets read-only access for the resources within the scope and not the cloud accounts that constitute the scope. After you create a scope, click View in the top-right corner to open the User Interface Layout and select the scope.

• Licensing

• Beam API
  Beam provides API services to allow you to programmatically retrieve data from the Beam's platform and perform different configurations.

User Interface Layout

This section provides information on the layout and navigation of the Beam console.

The Beam console provides a graphical user interface to manage Beam settings and features.

View Selector Pop-up

When you log on to the Beam for the first time, the View Selector pop-up appears. The View Selector pop-up allows you to search for an account by typing the account name in the search box or navigate and select a cloud account, business unit or cost center, and custom scope.

The Dashboard is the welcome page that appears after logging and selecting a view in Beam.

Figure. View Selector Pop-up

Click to enlarge

For the subsequent logins, the last visited page for the last selected view (account, business unit or cost center, and scope) appears. You can click View in the top-right corner to open the View Selector pop-up and select a different view.

Beam Console

The Beam Console screens are divided into different sections, as described in the following image and table.

Figure. Beam Console Overview

Click to enlarge