by Rich Bourdeau
Regardless if you’re actually charging for the specific resources consumed or just providing a view into each business’s resource consumption to feed next year’s funding allocation, showback reports provide valuable data to the business.
Although it is important to show each business a summary of how much they have consumed, it is also important to provide them a breakdown of who consumed which resources for how long. This detailed information is always useful in order to resolve disputes regarding the amount of consumption.
Showing the business users their usage and associate costs is one thing, but actually charging for them is another. Most companies already have some financial system in place. Make sure that your cloud management platform can feed the appropriate data into these financial systems to facilitate actual chargeback.
Finally showing or actually billing for IT services typically brings up questions about how can we get better control over our usage in order to reduce overprovisioning and reclaim and reuse inactive resources. Your cloud management tool is critical to enforcing the governance policies essential for better resource utilization as well as identifying and reclaiming inactive resources. Both of these capabilities are critical to helping the business gain control over the how much they will ultimately pay for their IT resources.
How VMware vRealize Suite Helps
VMware vRealize™ Automation provides basic IT utilization showback reporting that allows IT providers to deliver usage and cost information back to the business. Data from reports can be exported to a variety of different formats that can be used to feed actual financial chargeback systems.
vRealize Operations provides the health and utilization information necessary for administrators or authorized users to right size resource allocations to meet the needs of specific applications. In addition vRealize Operations feeds information about idle VMs into vRealize Automation, which automates the process of verifying the resource, is no longer needed before reclaiming and utilizing the resource for other purposes. Finally vRealize Automation provides cost savings reports that demonstrate to the business how much they have saved by proactively reclaiming inactive resources.
For those who need more advanced financial management capabilities, vRealize Business provides additional reporting to help companies better analyze TCO, unit cost and competitive benchmarking. vRealize Business understands vRealize Automation’s organizational structures allowing financial reports to be created per tenant or business group within tenant.
Learn more about VMware’s Cloud Automation solution.
- Watch the VMware IT Private Cloud – Exceeding Expectations video (2:28 min)
- Learn using the VCloud Automation 6.x Video Library
- Try HOL-SDC-1421 – Brokering IT Services and Applications with vRealize Automation
- Check out what some of our customers are saying in the customer case studies on our web site.
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