Welcome to the latest edition of our “What’s New?” series, where we dive into the exciting updates and enhancements in Surveil Product Release 3.5. At Surveil, we are committed to continuously innovating and improving our platform to meet the evolving needs of our partners and customers. In this article, we will explore the newest features, enhancements, and general fixes and updates that have been meticulously designed to enhance your experience and drive greater value from our solutions.
Whether you are a long-time user or a prospective partner considering Surveil, this update is packed with valuable insights into how we are making our platform more powerful, user-friendly, and efficient. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new in the Surveil platform and how these changes can benefit you.
Surveil for Azure
FOCUS Multi-cloud Capability
With the advent of FinOps FOCUS (Open Cost Usage Specification), it provides a democratizing event within the Cloud Cost Reporting and Optimization landscape, where billing data between clouds can be directly compared and analyzed. We have undertaken to develop connectors to fetch, tag and display data from the AWS and Google Clouds. This first phase will not include optimization of these cloud expenditure information. As a first deployment we’re focused on importing data, tagging data and placing this into our existing Cost Allocation Reports.
Multi-cloud Onboarding / Smart Tagging
With the introduction of FOCUS multi-cloud we have extended; our onboarding capabilities to AWS and GCP environments, and Smart Tagging Engine to tag resources within AWS and Google Cloud (GCP).
Tag Data for Subscriptions and Resource Groups
When a Subscription/Resource Group has its own tag, the system now can read this information and make it available to the Azure PowerBI reports.
Azure SP Amortized Costs
Amortized costs for savings plans have been made available to PowerBI. Surveil now has the ability calculate the Amortized SavingsPlan charges per month to be able to allocate costs based on usage of these contracts.
Enhancements to the Reader Access export file
The Reader Access output file has been enhanced to include all Reader Access and contains logs entries for all the different types of Reader access alignments’, i.e. Subscriptions, reservation orders, saving plans, etc.
Chargeback/Showback (Day) Enhancement
An enhancement in Azure daily data reporting has been introduced to the Chargeback/Showback (Day) report page. Enhancements to the “Day Run Rate” view include:
- The ability to change matrix row fields, column values and column headers.
- Predefined views with different combinations of fields/values, including analysis of contract hours.
- Data fields expanded and available to the Resource Name level.
Current Month Forecast Enhancements
The Current Month Forecast analytics have been expanded to allow for granular field selection down to the Resource level.
Surveil for Microsoft 365
Tagging Accounts into categories
We now automatically categorize, and tag Microsoft 365 accounts based on the account properties. The Account Types available for categorization at present are Service Account, Admin Account, and Shared Account (similar to mailbox).
New Recommendations Summary
Microsoft 365 recommendations are made across four categories: Financial, Adoption, Operations and Security, plus sub-categories through a new summary view. This update also included amendments to the current Recommendations – All Categories UI page.
Per-account Recommendations
When diving into an account via the Details link, a ‘Recommendations’ tab has been made available to list all optimizations related to that specific account.
Other Microsoft 365 pages where this is possible are:
- Optimize/Recommendations/Summary
- Optimize/Recommendations/Recommendations – All Categories
- Identity/Accounts/Accounts List
Recommendation Details Enhancement
We’ve improved the ‘Recommendation Details’ to be even more user friendly and valuable with expanded analysis options and data columns (i.e. Impacts & Excess License Reduction)
New and improved recommendations for Microsoft 365 (Preview)
We introduced new and revised recommendations across the Financial and Security categories. We reworked the Financial recommendations in the Recategorize and Overlapping categories, plus we have a Shared Mailboxes recommendation in the Security category.
Microsoft 365 – New Copilot Usage Trend
Track your AI investment and deployment projects with the new M365 Copilot usage trends by application from 7 days to 6 months with per-user interaction stats.
Maintain optimal M365 Copilot investment value
Understand how employees use Microsoft 365 Copilot and make data-driven decisions about reassignment from low usage to candidate users who would potentially benefit from it instead. This data helps businesses maximize the value of their investment and keep their busiest users at their most productive.
Microsoft 365 – Licensing Dashboard
Visual enhancements have been made to that align to a program of UI/UX improvements that will be visible product-wide over the next 6-12 months.
Contract details and bulk pricing import capability
As requested by customers and partners, the M365 Pricing page has been enhanced with a Contract Parameters editor and a bulk pricing update capability. With Contract Parameters, you can change the contract Enrolment ID, Type, Discount level, Start, End and Renewal Date. For the Bulk Microsoft 365 Pricing updates, these can be made offline and imported after editing the exported XLSX file.
Report performance improvements
Microsoft 365 report improvements to Core/Essentials and Security from performance-tuning in very large tenant environments are being deployed as standard across all instances that will reduce data-processing load and time at the backend.
Surveil Navigator
Navigator: Partner Earned Credit (“PEC”) Reports
Navigator introduces new screens to provide detailed insights into Partner Earned Credit (“PEC”), covering eligibility, earnings, and missed opportunities.
Benefits include:
- Comprehensive PEC overview
- Detailed eligibility tracking
- Insights into earned PEC
- Identification of missed opportunities
- Enhanced partner performance
- Strategic decision support
- Improved PEC management
Combining Microsoft Partner Center (“MPC”) Dataset into a single view
Navigator is now capable of combining multiple Microsoft Partner Center datasets into a single, unified view for comprehensive insights.
Benefits include:
- Unified data view
- Regional data integration
- Enhanced business insights
- Streamlined analysis
- Improved decision-making
- Comprehensive reporting
- Simplified data management
Bulk onboarding for CSP Providers
Introducing Navigator Bulk Onboarding, a new data collection engine for Navigator, streamlining the onboarding process by collecting only essential Metric data. This enables partners to efficiently identify and run campaigns across their Microsoft customers.
Benefits include:
- Simplifies initial data collection for customer tenants.
- Facilitates targeted campaign execution by partners.
- Reduces workload on instances by collecting summarized Metrics.
- Enhances sales potential for Essentials licenses.
- Promotes better customer adoption and engagement.