Overview
This article explains how to recover and share your Cloud services data with Greenly so we can refine the carbon footprint of your Cloud usage. In many companies — especially in the Digital sector — Cloud services represent a significant share of the overall carbon footprint.
By default, the Greenly platform estimates the impact of these services from the transactions in your accounting file. This is a useful large-scale estimate, but its uncertainty can be high depending on your Cloud providers, their infrastructure, and the types of services you use. Sharing your detailed data lets us go further and produce a more precise analysis.
Key benefits / use cases
More accurate Cloud emissions than an accounting-based estimate, using the actual nature of the services you consume (compute, storage, transfer, etc.)
Captures detailed usage: hardware type, computing instance names, virtual processor hours, bandwidth, storage capacity, and more
Three flexible ways to share data: API connection, detailed invoices, or your provider's own carbon footprint export
Supported for the main providers: AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), OVH Cloud, and Microsoft Azure
1. Why share your detailed Cloud data
The Greenly platform can analyze the impact of your Cloud services at a large scale by analyzing the transactions in your accounting file. This remains an estimate whose uncertainty can be very large depending on the Cloud providers you deal with, their infrastructure, the types of services you benefit from, etc.
To go further, we analyze your detailed service invoices. These invoices are not simple documents about monetary transactions only — they specify the nature of the services you consume:
Type of service: compute, storage, transfer, etc.
Description of the hardware: type of component, name of the computing instance, etc.
Quantities used per service: virtual processor hours consumed, bandwidth, storage capacity used (GB), throughput, etc.
And potentially much more information!
2. The three ways to send us your Cloud data
There are three possibilities to share your Cloud data:
The API connection — available for Microsoft Azure
Manual retrieval of cloud invoices — only for cases where the API connection is impossible; this can lead to lower precision in the Cloud study (here are examples of cloud invoices)
Manual retrieval of the cloud carbon footprint from your provider— for now, only the AWS,GCP, and OVH methodologies have been rated sufficient by our experts
We recommend using the API connection when available, to speed up the analysis.
3. How to share your detailed Cloud invoices
If you are using one (or more) of the following 4 cloud providers, please follow the specific procedure listed below.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
You now have access to a reliable carbon footprint from your AWS "Billing and cost management" space. Follow this process:
Step 1: Connect to your AWS account, and go to the Billing and cost management section.
Step 2: Go to the "Customer Carbon Footprint Tool".
Step 3: In the calculation method, make sure LBM and MBM are selected. The date range covers 38 months, and should include the date range of your assessment.
Step 4: Click on "Download CSV" at the top of the page (don't click on "Download CSV (previous model)", since it would extract data from a previous version of the tool).
Step 5: Share the extracted file with Greenly, using the file import tool of your Cloud module.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Your carbon footprint exports are available on your Google Cloud console. Here is how to export your cloud carbon footprint data.
Once you've set up the export, you can send us the.xlsx or.csv file generated, and add it in your Cloud module as a proof document.
OVH Cloud
Your carbon footprint exports are available on your dashboard, in the "Carbon footprint" section. Make sure to collect the data for all the months of the assessment.
Once you've collected these files, send them to us via the platform by going to Company information > My files and let your project manager know that they are available.
Microsoft Azure
You can follow this procedure (also visible in your Azure module) to share your Microsoft Azure data with us.
If you have any questions, please contact the Support Team via the chat.