Sustainability Dashboard

The Sustainability Dashboard is designed to help users monitor and improve the environmental impact of their websites on Umbraco Cloud. The dashboard provides insights and metrics related to carbon footprint and sustainable practices, enabling organizations to align their digital presence with their sustainability goals.

Key Features

• Daily CO2 emission calculation: The dashboard is updated daily with new CO2 emission estimates.

• Historical data: The dashboard tracks monthly and yearly CO2 emission estimates, allowing for trend analysis over time

• Comparative analysis: Users can compare CO2 emissions across their projects to identify high-impact areas and improvement opportunities.

CO2 emission calculation methodology

To estimate CO2 emissions from the infrastructure deployed to host Umbraco Cloud websites, we use Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF). followed by dividing CO2 emissions among websites according to their shared resource usage.

In order to improve the estimate for websites that are running in shared pools we divide emissions based on metrics/usage coefficients.

In its current iteration the sustainability dashboard shows CO2 emissions emitted by backend compute infrastructure - Azure App Service. The dashboard does not show emissions generated by networking, frontend website impressions or emissions generated by the Umbraco Cloud Service.

The summarized algorithm currently in use is:

Project CO2 emissions = Sum of environment CO2 emissions
Environment CO2 emissions = Total CO2 emissions of backend compute infrastructure * Usage coefficient of the environemnts compute resources

Cloud Carbon Footprint

Cloud Carbon Footprint(CCF) provides a comprehensive methodology for estimating CO2 emissions in their documentation. We use CCF to calculate the Sum of environmental CO2 emissions.

CCF CO2 emissions = Operational emissions + Embodied emissions

Operational emissions = (Cloud provider service usage) x (Cloud energy conversion factors [kWh]) x (Cloud provider Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)) x (grid emissions factors [metric tons CO2e])
Embodied emissions = Estimated metric tons CO2 emissions from the manufacturing of the datacenter

Umbraco Cloud Usage

For websites on shared infrastructure in Umbraco Cloud, we calculate a usage coefficient to improve the accuracy of CO2 emission estimates. This coefficient divides the CO2 emissions of the shared pool among the websites using it.

The usage coefficient for a website is based on metrics such as:

• CPU

• Memory usage

The usage coefficient for a database is based on DTUs used etc.

Website CO2 emissions = Usage coefficient * CCF CO2 emissions
Usage coefficient =  Website resource usage / Total pool usage

Website Resource Usage: For compute resources we evaluate metrics such as CPU, memory or disk, for storage resources DTUs and disk are considered. Total Pool Usage: The total resource usage of the shared pool of resources.

Getting Started

Accessing the Dashboard

1. Log in to Umbraco Cloud: Use your credentials to log in to your Umbraco Cloud account.

2. Navigate to the Organization view

3. Navigate to the Dashboard: From the left menu, select Sustainability.

Decreasing Carbon Emission Impact

• Monitor Regularly: Regularly check the Sustainability Dashboard to stay informed about your website's carbon footprint.

• Implement Recommendations: Follow up to date sustainability best practices.

• Optimize Resource Usage: Analyze websites resource usage and identify high-consumption areas to optimize resource usage