About
Kion is a multi-cloud management tool used by the Northwestern IT Cloud Operations team to provide management and spending transparency to public cloud account owners. This article explains how to access and use the features provided by Kion.
Getting Access to Kion
Northwestern IT grants Kion access to cloud account owners and technical contacts during the initial account provisioning process. Account owners are able to manage access to Kion by adding members to groups in the Azure Portal or in the Self-Service AD Tool under My Office 365 Groups. Kion access groups have a format like 'AAD-Kion-<department>-<name>'.
If you are a current cloud account owner or operator at Northwestern and need Kion access, please email servicedesk@northwestern.edu, with #cloudops in the email subject and the cloud account you are a member of in the request.
Access Kion by navigating to https://cloudgate.northwestern.edu/ using the Chrome web browser.
Note: other browsers will work, but are not supported by Kion.
Click the box for Northwestern University SAML and login with your NetID and password.
Logging in for the first time, you can either Skip for Now or Save and Continue to setup your dashboard and choose whether to subscribe to the Kion newsletter.
Public cloud accounts are grouped and managed by Projects within Kion. In most cases, a Kion Project is 1:1 to a Funding Source within the platform, where that Funding Source is typically a blanket purchase order within NUFinancials.
Click on the folder icon in the left navigation or click All Projects.
The resulting webpage will display a list of Kion Projects that you have permission to view. If there is a cloud account or Project you expect to see here but don't, reach out to Northwestern IT to verify. Note: one Kion Project can be tracking more than one cloud account and type.
Click on a Project name to view more information about the accounts and financials tracked by the Project.
Kion will display the project overview dashboard when clicking into a project. From here, clicking the navigation tabs in the top row will provide further details about the project settings as well as the accounts and financials being tracked by it. Let's take a closer look at those tabs and what information and functionality each provides.
Accounts: This tab/page displays the account(s) being tracked by this project in Kion. Typically there is one account listed here but there may be more if you pay for multiple accounts with one purchase order.
Financials: This tab/page displays more information about the financials for this project and the accounts it contains, as well as additional navigation to drill down into more details.
Project Spending: A dashboard view of spend by the accounts in the project. Here you see how much has been spent against your active budget (fiscal year purchase order total), monthly spending trends including budgeted/spent and variance, as well as spend by each account in the project.
Budgets: Northwestern IT configures a new budget for you each fiscal year based on the total dollar amount of each annual purchase order. Kion automatically spreads the total amount evenly across the remaining months in the fiscal year to help keep track of monthly spending. The small green arrow (or gray on the spending widget) represents how much has been budgeted while the green bar displays how much has been spent beyond or below what has been budgeted to date.
Monthly Spending: A month to month breakdown of the total spent by accounts in the project. Click on the month to view a more detailed spend report for that month.
Spend Reports: This tool allows you to further report on spend being tracked by the Kion project. Specify criteria for the report such as the timeframe and dimension to see a monthly breakdown of spending.
Available dimensions to report by are account, service, region, Kion label, tags, provider, and funding and billing sources.
For example, choosing to report by service will display a breakdown of how much of the monthly bill is for each service in the graph. Scroll to see the breakdown under the chart, or mouse over sections of the graph to see the specific spend by service. For more information on spend reports, view the section on Reporting.
Savings Opportunities: This tab/page presents users with recommendations for saving money on usage in the account. Kion has built in checks to see whether there are opportunities for savings and lists them for review.
Note: Kion does not take all patterns into account such as peak vs. non-peak usage and capacity planning. Carefully review these recommendations prior to implementing them to ensure your services, data, and work is not impacted.
Click on an opportunity check to view more details about possible savings that can be applied. See more details, mark a finding as applied or dismiss it by hovering over the line item menu.
Enforcements: Enforcements are rules for when spending in a project reaches specific thresholds. Northwestern IT gets notified when the spend rate in a project exceeds 50% of what is budgeted for the month triggering an email. Additional enforcement rules can be added by requesting them from Northwestern IT. Email servicedesk@northwestern.edu, include #cloudops in the email subject to request an enforcement.
Compliance: This will only show data if you have asked to enable features to track your resources against common security and compliance frameworks. If you are interested in these features, please start by speaking with Northwestern IT Cloud Operations for assistance. Email servicedesk@northwestern.edu, include #cloudops in the email subject to request a consultation on compliance requirements.
Users: This section displays users and groups that have access to the specific project and have logged into Kion to view it.
Permissions: If you want to view what permissions users and roles have over the project you can see those in this section. However, this is largely for administrative purposes.
Notes: This is largely unused but can have project-specific notes added if requested.
Cloud Management: For administrative use only, Northwestern IT uses cloud rules to establish guardrails for the cloud environments managed by Kion.
Settings: Also largely administrative, this sections controls notifications from Kion.
Reporting on spend in your cloud accounts is an important feature of Kion, designed to help you keep your budget on track. By default, Kion provides some out of the box saved reports that may not be useful to you. Click the button to Get Started or on Spend Reports in the left navigation to get started building your own custom spend report.
Setting up Spend Reports
Top level reporting looks and functions similarly to the Project reporting, but has more Report Criteria, Filters, and labels/tags for you to define. These criteria allow you to report on spend across Kion Projects, cloud accounts or providers, services and more over a specified timeframe. Kion also allows you to save these reports so they can be run on demand, those will show up under My Saved Reports.
In addition to saving a report, you can also schedule it to run at regular intervals with multiple delivery options. These options include one-time downloads and emails, and the option to share a link to the report with other authenticated Kion users.
Example: The report in the image above is setup to display daily spend by service and filter by a specific project.
Interactive Reports: Kion Spend Report graphs are highly interactive. They allow you to zoom in and zoom out to adjust your view. You can hover and click through to see how much is spent by the dimension such as Service in a given day or month.
Kion Offers a Resource Inventory feature for many common service types across the Cloud Providers. Note: This feature is still in preview and does not cover all available cloud services and may be subject to visual and functional changes over time.
Choose View All for the resources you'd like to see. Select the resource in the upper right pane to view more information about it in the lower right pane.
Select or search to filter by additional dimensions such as service, region, time, etc. to find resources.
All Users / User Groups: Users and Groups in Kion are both mapped to the corresponding Entra ID resources. Kion will only display details of Users (that have logged in previously) and Groups for the projects you have access to. All access management is delegated to Entra ID where the group memberships can be managed in the Azure Portal or in the Self-Service AD Tool by a group owner.
Reach out to Northwestern IT with any questions regarding Kion or cloud accounts.
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