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Ramp plans

Overview​

Spend-based commitment discounts are popular rate optimizations offered by cloud service providers. To take full advantage of commitment discounts, you need to monitor your spend constantly and make necessary adjustments in time.

If your AWS or GCP contract contains spend-based commitments, the Ramp plans feature can help you meet your goal.

The Ramp plans feature visualizes your progress against the committed goal, highlights potential capacity planning, and tracks your progress so you can act in advance.

Note

Required Permissions:

  • Create/edit/delete: Contracts Viewer

  • View: Ramp Plans viewer

Access ramp plans​

To access Ramp Plans, log in to the DoiT Console, select Billing from the top navigation bar, and then select Ramp plans.

The Ramp Plans screen.

The Ramp plans screen lists all the active plans.

Each plan's progress towards its goal is indicated by the color of its Attainment progress bar.

  • green: The actual spend is greater than the planned spend.
  • red: The actual spend is less than the planned spend.

Hovering over an attainment progress bar will reveal the current percentage (rounded) of the goal achieved.

View a ramp plan​

To view a ramp plan, select the name of the plan on the Ramp plans screen. You'll find the following information on the top of the screen:

  • Plan total: Your committed cloud spend.

  • Start Date: The date when the commit contract begins.

  • Plan Duration: The total number of months during which the commit contract is effective.

  • Est. Ramp complete: The estimated month when your ramp plan achieves its goal, which is when the planned total reaches the commitment target. If you change the planned data, this field will change accordingly.

View a ramp plan.

  • Ramp plan periods and periods totals are based on the commitment periods and commitment amounts in the contract.

  • If the contract doesn't contain commitment periods, the total amount of the commitment will be evenly spread out between the months throughout the contract period.

Create a ramp plan​

To create a new ramp plan:

  1. Select + New Ramp in the upper-right corner on the Ramp plans screen.

  2. Define the new plan.

    The new ramp plan form.

    1. Enter a unique name for the plan.

    2. From the drop-down list, choose the contract with a commitment that you want to track.

      Note

      You won't be able to change the contract once the plan is created.

    3. Once you've completed the two steps above, you can select Create to generate the ramp plan, or upload your own planned data in a CSV file first and then create the plan.

Ramp plan file format​

Tip

To ensure the planned data is processed correctly, we recommend you to download an existing ramp plan as a template, modify it, and then upload the corrected version; or edit the ramp plan after creating it.

If you choose to upload your own planned data, use the following conventions:

  • The format of the file must be CSV.

  • For each period, the CSV file must contain a row starting with Period (case insensitive), followed by the value Plan (case sensitive).

  • The value Plan must be followed by the planned data for all the period months, while each value represents a monthly data, with a placeholder data for the period total in the row end (the DoiT Platform will calculate the actual period total when creating the ramp plan).

  • The data in the Plan row will be processed sequentially till it hits the value Actual (case sensitive). Each Plan row must have its own Actual, which can be in the Plan row itself or on a separate row.

Edit a ramp plan​

When viewing an existing ramp plan, you can click in any of the Plan cells to manually adjust the planned data (you can't change the periods dates).

You can also click the collapse button in the upper-right corner of a cell to adjust the ramp growth for the subsequent periods.

Edit a ramp plan.

You can set ramp growth per month using either one of the following two options:

  • Specifying a uniform growth percentage for the subsequent months: The ramp plan will automatically update the data of each month to the previous month + % growth.

  • Setting the current month as the baseline: The ramp plan will automatically update each subsequent month to adopt the same value as the current month.

Download and upload a ramp plan​

When viewing an existing ramp plan, you can use the two icons at the right-hand side of the chart to download the plan or upload a revised plan.

Download and upload icons on a ramp plan page.

Delete a ramp plan​

To delete a ramp plan:

  1. Locate the target ramp plan on the Ramp plans screen.

  2. Select the checkbox of the ramp plan.

    Select a ramp plan to delete it.

  3. Select Delete.

    You'll be asked to confirm the deletion before it's executed.

Limitations​

Each ramp plan works only for one billing profile.

If you change your billing profile after creating a ramp plan, the plan will not be updated with the new billing profile, and you may see discrepancies between your actual spend and the spend shown in the ramp plan. We recommend creating a new ramp plan with the new billing profile in such cases.

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