VMware NSX and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) enable organizations to build secure, scalable, and software-defined networking environments across public cloud platforms. NSX provides network virtualization and micro-segmentation, while Avi delivers intelligent load balancing, application traffic management, and service availability.
These deployments rely on cloud infrastructure such as virtual machines, networking services, storage, and data transfer. As organizations expand their NSX and Avi environments across multiple applications, regions, and cloud providers, understanding how infrastructure costs are distributed becomes increasingly challenging.
ManageEngine CloudSpend provides a centralized view of NSX and Avi-related cloud spending across AWS, Azure, and GCP by identifying resources using predefined NSX and Avi tags. It maps cloud billing data to these tagged resources and aggregates the associated costs, helping you analyze spending, improve cost allocation, and optimize your cloud networking infrastructure.
NSX/Avi cost management is the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing the cloud infrastructure costs associated with VMware NSX and Avi deployments.
CloudSpend uses NSX and Avi-specific tags to associate cloud infrastructure costs with logical networking and application delivery components. Although cloud providers generate the billing information, these tags help organize costs according to your NSX and Avi architecture.
Effective NSX/Avi cost management involves:
CloudSpend simplifies NSX and Avi cost management across AWS, Azure, and GCP by combining cloud billing data with tagged infrastructure resources.
Instead of manually tracing cloud resources back to networking components, CloudSpend automatically identifies NSX and Avi resources using predefined tags such as Cluster ID, Security Group, and Service Engine Group. It then maps infrastructure costs to these logical entities, providing meaningful visibility into networking and application delivery expenses.
This enables you to:
CloudSpend also helps distinguish networking and application delivery costs from other cloud workloads, empowering you to determine whether spending changes originate from security policies, traffic distribution, or supporting cloud infrastructure.
Trend analysis and anomaly detection make it easier to identify unexpected infrastructure costs. For example, if additional service engines are deployed to handle increased application traffic, the resulting cloud costs are reflected in the report.
You can also configure budgets and alerts based on tagged NSX and Avi resources, enabling teams to proactively monitor networking-related cloud expenses.
By organizing cloud costs using NSX and Avi-specific tags, CloudSpend transforms cloud billing data into actionable insights that improve financial visibility across your software defined networking environment.
CloudSpend uses the following entities to identify and track your NSX and Avi resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.
| Report category | Report display name | Description | Tag key | Tag value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NSX | Cluster ID | The NSX cluster ID | nsx:cluster-id | <cluster-id> |
| NSX | Security Group | The NSX security group | nsx:security-group | <security-group> |
| Avi | Service Engine Group | The Avi service engine group | avi:service-engine-group | <service-engine-group> |
These tags organize cloud infrastructure costs according to your NSX and Avi deployment architecture, enabling detailed cost analysis across networking and application delivery resources.
CloudSpend uses the entities cited in the table above to identify and organize your NSX and Avi resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. These tags connect cloud billing data with your virtual networking and application delivery infrastructure, helping you to understand how cloud costs are distributed across different networking components.
The Cluster ID tag represents an NSX deployment that hosts virtual networking and security services. CloudSpend uses this tag to aggregate cloud costs for each cluster, making it easier to compare infrastructure spending across different NSX environments and identify clusters with higher operational costs.
The Security Group tag represents a logical collection of workloads that share common network security policies. CloudSpend uses this tag to associate cloud costs with policy-based network segmentation, delivering the key insights needed to protect your application environments that contribute to your overall cloud spending.
The Service Engine Group tag represents a collection of Avi service engines responsible for load balancing and application traffic management. CloudSpend tracks cloud costs associated with these service engine groups, enabling you to evaluate how application delivery workloads consume cloud infrastructure resources and identify opportunities to optimize capacity planning.
By organizing cloud costs using these NSX and Avi-specific tags, CloudSpend provides granular cost visibility across your networking environment. You can analyze spending by cluster, security group, and service engine group, compare networking deployments, identify high-cost environments, and improve infrastructure planning without manually correlating cloud billing information.
Here are some of the key benefits of the NSX/Avi cost report:
The NSX/Avi cost report provides a centralized view of cloud infrastructure costs associated with your networking and application delivery deployments across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
By combining cloud billing data with NSX and Avi-specific resource tags, the report helps you understand how infrastructure costs are distributed across clusters, security groups, and service engine groups. This enables you to identify cost trends, compare networking environments, and make informed decisions to optimize cloud infrastructure spending.
Follow these steps to view the report:
1. Log in to CloudSpend and go to Reports.
2. Select the NSX cost report.
3. Use filters to narrow down by account, region, or resource.
4. Select the required account to view the Spend Analysis dashboard.
The Spend Analysis view provides a consolidated overview of the cloud costs associated with your NSX and Avi deployments across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It combines billing information with tagged networking resources, allowing you to understand how your cloud infrastructure budget is allocated across software defined networking and application delivery services.
From this view, you can monitor the total cloud cost for the selected time period, identify the highest spending cloud accounts, subscriptions, or projects, and detect anomalies that indicate unexpected infrastructure cost increases.
You can also analyze cost distribution across services, regions, resource groups, and cloud accounts to understand how networking infrastructure contributes to overall cloud spending. Trend analysis helps identify periods where networking costs increased because of application growth, policy changes, or infrastructure expansion.
Since CloudSpend attributes costs using NSX and Avi-specific tags, you can quickly determine whether changes in spending are associated with a particular cluster, security group, or service engine group. This simplifies cost investigations and improves visibility into networking-related cloud expenses.
The Resource Explorer provides a flexible way to analyze cloud costs across your NSX and Avi infrastructure. It enables you to examine tagged resources from multiple perspectives, helping you understand how networking and application delivery costs are distributed throughout your cloud environment.
You can analyze cloud costs across accounts, subscriptions, projects, services, regions, resource groups, and tags, depending on the cloud provider. This flexibility allows you to understand infrastructure ownership while maintaining visibility into your networking deployments.
The Resource Explorer also enables you to group costs using NSX and Avi-specific tags such as Cluster ID, Security Group, and Service Engine Group. This makes it easier to attribute cloud spending to logical networking components and evaluate the infrastructure costs associated with application traffic management and network security.
In addition, you can monitor total costs for a selected period, compare historical spending trends, and apply filters to focus on specific cloud providers, services, regions, or tagged networking resources.
By allowing you to explore cloud costs across multiple dimensions, the Resource Explorer helps improve cost accountability, simplify infrastructure analysis, and identify opportunities to optimize your NSX and Avi deployments while maintaining network performance, security, and application availability.