Implemented

Chargeback on Orion Based VMAN Install

Provide chargeback reporting in Orion similar to what is available on the VMAN appliance.

Virtualization Chargeback Software | SolarWinds

  • Create VMAN cost centers
  • Define chargeback pricing model
  • Create chargeback dashboards and reports
  • Extend functionality to Cloud infrastructure Monitoring (AWS & Azure)
Parents
  • My company is currently looking for a solution to calculating chargebacks. Is this something that might get put on the road map? It seems like something that was very useful in the appliance that is no longer available with the Orion deployment.

  • horizenred  wrote:

    My company is currently looking for a solution to calculating chargebacks. Is this something that might get put on the road map? It seems like something that was very useful in the appliance that is no longer available with the Orion deployment.

    Hi Matthew,

    what is the output that you would be showing to consumers of the chargeback data? Can you give me more details on your use case?

  • Serena,

    I am a bit new at the application of chargebacks and costs analytics since we’ve never implemented this before in our org though familiar with the concepts.

    Currently, administration and management are looking at two factors that play into each other.

    1) What does it cost to run any given application in our environment. This would include things like compute, storage, and memory, but also include things like bandwidth utilizations, and storage tiering or I/O utilization. Things that could also potentially be taken into account is electrical power consumption, cooling, and equipment refresh costs.

    2) Once we have numbers from 1, we can use them for a couple of things outside of knowing the internal costs. The first is a cost comparison to vendor hosted applications to determine if moving to a remote solution is justified. And second, we are also looking into cloud hosting like Azure/AWS. We can then get a good idea of cost comparisons.

    We could certainly use this info for more, but for now, this is the ask from those above myself. Please let me know if you have any questions!

  • I've thought on this a bit as well, and am interested in how others calculate the compute cost with regard to different chipsets: would you determine the cost based on CPU model, generation, etc; the cost based on SPECInt numbers, or just a rough and rounded cost by MHz?

Comment Children
  • I spoke extensively with a peer today to see how we would best approach this and how to best reply to you.

    Since we would not be actually implementing chargebacks, but are looking at this at a showback (cost analytics) level, and since we are not in the business of IT as a service, we decided that we would want to price things simply as if we would earn our money back at the end of the equipment life cycle. In regards to your question above, I believe that we would charge compute of a VM based on a per cpu or per Ghz allocated to the VM. Since there is no profit to be made, there is no concern on cycles consumed. Memory would also be charged as allocated.

    Storage would be charged by data consumed. The only consideration here being if the VM storage was thick or thin provisioned. If thin, then only charged for the total space used by the end of that billing cycle. If thick, then always billed for the full amount. The thin provisioning would allow for you to see the cost growth month to month which could be useful.

    These three numbers would at least get you the hardware costs per server, which doesn't take into account networking, electrical consumed, cooling, additional HW licensing (like VMWare licensing), administrative costs (labor), monitoring software, etc.

  • horizenred  wrote:

    I spoke extensively with a peer today to see how we would best approach this and how to best reply to you.

    Since we would not be actually implementing chargebacks, but are looking at this at a showback (cost analytics) level, and since we are not in the business of IT as a service, we decided that we would want to price things simply as if we would earn our money back at the end of the equipment life cycle. In regards to your question above, I believe that we would charge compute of a VM based on a per cpu or per Ghz allocated to the VM. Since there is no profit to be made, there is no concern on cycles consumed. Memory would also be charged as allocated.

    Storage would be charged by data consumed. The only consideration here being if the VM storage was thick or thin provisioned. If thin, then only charged for the total space used by the end of that billing cycle. If thick, then always billed for the full amount. The thin provisioning would allow for you to see the cost growth month to month which could be useful.

    These three numbers would at least get you the hardware costs per server, which doesn't take into account networking, electrical consumed, cooling, additional HW licensing (like VMWare licensing), administrative costs (labor), monitoring software, etc.

    This is great, thank you for sharing this insight.