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Foglight Cost Director 5.8 - User Guide

Enabling the Quest Pricing Cloud & Data Protection Portal Integration

The Quest Pricing Cloud is a live DB of Infrastructure as a Service Offerings and their associated costs. Pricing data is collected daily from the leading public cloud and participating managed service providers (MSPs). You can select the Enabling the Quest Pricing Cloud & Data Protection Portal Integration checkbox, and then click Start to interface with Foglight Cost Director. Then you will be directed to the Initialize Cost Director dashboard. For more information, see Creating a default Price Plan.

Creating a default Price Plan

When you start up Foglight Cost Director the first time, you will be directed to the Initialize Cost Director dialog box which walks you through the procedure of setting up the default Price Plan.

Figure 1. Initialize Cost Director

To create the default Price Plan:
1
Log in to the Foglight browser interface and make sure the left navigation panel is open.
2
On the navigation panel, under Homes, click Cost Director.
The Cost Director dashboard opens.
3
In the Cost Director dashboard, click Activate.
The Initialize Cost Director dashboard opens.
4
Your Business: Create an Organization and a Business Unit and click Next. Then the cost allocations for all virtual machines and the initial ownership of your IT assets will be assigned to the created Organization and Business Unit by default.
* 
TIP: The search function is provided for better locating your position. The Location Name, Longitude, and Latitude will be filled in automatically after you click Apply in the Search dialog box.
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Organization: Specify the Name, Location Name, Longitude, Latitude, and Description, as needed.
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Business Unit: Specify the Name, Location Name, Longitude, Latitude, and Description, as needed.
5
Datacenter Costs: A Price Plan includes five parts:
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Hypervisors Cost per year: Specify the Hypervisors cost in dollars.
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Windows Server Cost per year: Specify the Windows Server cost in dollars.
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RHEL Cost per year: Specify the RHEL cost in dollars.
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Hourly Labor Cost per year: Specify the Hourly Labor cost in dollars.
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Facilities Cost per year: Specify the Facility Type, Facilities Cost Per Year, Expected VM Number, CPU Cost per Month, RAM Cost per Month, Storage Cost per Month, and I/O Operation Cost per 10000.
Regarding CPU Cost per Month, RAM Cost per Month, Storage Cost per Month, and I/O Operation Cost per 10000, Foglight Cost Director also provides a calculator to help you populate these four fields for your servers and storage. Click Launch Compute Cost Calculator on the Datacenter Costs view.
The following lists the formula of populating:
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CPU Cost per Month = (Total Servers Cost x CPU Cost Weight%) / (Server Lifecycle Year x 12 month) x Active Server Count x Server CPU Cores x CPU Speed x vCPU/Cores Ratio x (1 - CPU Reservation%)
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RAM Cost per Month = (Total Servers Cost x Memory Cost Weight) / (Server Lifecycle Year x 12 month) x Active Server Count x Server RAM x (1 - RAM Reservation%)
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Storage Cost per Month = (Total Storage Cost x Space Cost Weight%) / (Storage Lifecycle Year x 12 month) x (Total Storage Space x 1024)
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I/O Operation Cost per 10000 = 10000 x (Total Storage Cost x IO Cost Weight%) / (IOPS Capacity x Storage Lifecycle Year x 365 x 24 x 3600)
Taking numbers in the above figure for example, you can get the following values:
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CPU Cost per Month = 600x0.3/6x12x3x2x5x1x(1-50%)=0.167
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RAM Cost per Month = 600x0.7/6x12x3x3x(1-50%)=1.296
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RAM Cost per Month =6000000x50%/6x12x500x1024=0.081
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I/O Operation Cost per 10000 = 100000x6000000x50%/100000x6x365x24x3600=0.016
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(Optional): After you get the Cost Structure, click Create & View Custom Add-on Charges to view the default Price Plan, add another Add-on Cost, or remove Add-on Cost if needed.
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NOTE: The default Price Plan cannot be removed.
7
VM Ownership: Select the unallocated VMs from the left table, and then click Move In to assign the selected virtual machines to the specified Business Unit, as needed. Click Next.
8
Costs Summary: View the topology dependency on the Costs Summary view, and then click Finish.
9
The creation of the default Price Plan is completed, and then the Cost Director > On-Premises dashboard opens by default. Also you can view the detailed information about created Organization, Business Unit, Default Price Plan, and Topology dependency view through the Cost Director > On-Premises > Administration dashboard.

Recommended additional reading

As tasks on the Chargeback dashboard and the Cloud Cost dashboard are commonly used throughout Foglight and Foglight Evolve products, Quest recommends that you read the following guides to understand both dashboards and the relevant tasks.

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Chapter “Reporting on Your Enterprise” in the Foglight User Guide.
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Chapter “Cost Tab” in the Foglight Hybrid Cloud Manager for Azure User and Administration Guide.
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Chapter “Bubble Chart User Guide” and “Scatter Chart User Guide” in the Web Component Reference.

All data and metrics, which are presented and calculated by Foglight Cost Director, are from the Foglight for VMware cartridge. Quest also recommends that you read through the Foglight for VMware User and Reference Guide & Foglight for VMware Installation Guide to get a comprehensive understanding about the Foglight for VMware.

Using Foglight Cost Director

On-Premises dashboard

The On-Premises dashboard displays the statistic total cost of organizations, business units, and virtual machines in the last 7/30/90 days. Metrics and charts in this tab will be updated every day or you could click the Recalculate button to manually update all charts. To access this dashboard, under Homes, click Cost Director.

This dashboard consists of the following two tabs:

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Monitoring tab
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Filters for showing resource costs, which includes the following three conditions:
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View by: Calculate the resource costs based on Allocated costs or Consumed costs. Allocated is selected by default.
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Organization: Lists all available organizations.
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Time Range: Provides three time period of metrics calculation. Last 30 Days is selected by default.
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The On-Premises charts, which appears on the On-Premises dashboard by default after you click Cost Director > On-Premises.
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Administration tab
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