Foglight Chargeback 5.7.0 - User Guide

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 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:

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: