Foglight Chargeback 5.7.7 - User Guide

Using Foglight Chargeback

Foglight™ Chargeback generates detailed reports on who spends what inside your IT infrastructure. You are an IT manager with hundreds, if not thousands of virtual machines (VM) or physical machines (PM) in your IT Infrastructure. Virtual machines can be added quickly and appear to be free of cost. As customers add workloads to their virtual environments, determining the true cost of each virtual machine is an important component in managing server sprawl. As IT budgets become more constrained, chief information officers are asked to inform senior management what the IT infrastructure is actually costing, broken down by departments, for example, accounting and human resources. Organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars procuring high-end hosts, virtualization software, and storage area network (SAN) disk storage. IT finance needs a way to determine actual resource utilization and fairly charge internal departments for their system utilization.

Foglight Chargeback Host Support

Foglight™ Chargeback gathers data from both Hyper-V and VMware virtualization software. To gather data and build chargeback reports using Foglight Chargeback, you must install one or both of the following:

Understanding Chargeback Models

Foglight™ Chargeback supports industry standard models to determine IT infrastructure costs. These models provide IT managers with the ability to monitor and report the costs associated with host machine usage within data centers. Foglight Chargeback provides the following models:

Tiered Flat Rate Model

The Tiered Flat Rate chargeback model can be thought of as charging a flat rate for host machine cost. Another way to look at it would be your telephone bill. You are charged a flat rate to use the phone each month regardless of usage.

A tier is a level of expense for a host machine. The Tiered Flat Rate model divides IT costs into levels of expense. For example, an organization has decided to build a new virtual infrastructure, mandating that any new server requested by the various business units of the company must first be created as a virtual machine. Only after verifying that a virtual machine cannot properly handle the application workload, would the physical server options be explored.

To simplify the budgetary process for new systems, the organization could create three core configurations tiers and assign the following fixed cost to each tier:

Business units may customize the configuration and pay an additional cost per megabyte of memory or gigabyte of storage space, based on the cost units for the particular resource in question.