Organizations tend to look at costs through different perspectives depending on the stakeholder who receives a cost report. The Finance department might want a monthly breakdown of costs by product line or shared environment. Operations might need a cost breakdown by project or team. Engineering might want a cost breakdown by application role.
In a large-scale cloud environment, these perspectives change over time, so it is important to be able to align costs and organize assets in ways that mirror the business.
It can be challenging to identify all assets and resources that make up your cloud environment and organize them from a business perspective. Furthermore, creating groups that meet business-reporting requirements can be difficult if there is a large number of costs not associated with resources at the end of each month.
AWS and Azure report two types of costs:
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth classifies an AWS or Azure Service as a Direct Cost or Indirect Cost. When AWS or Azure introduces a service, the platform initially classifies the service cost as an Indirect Cost. Then, when support for that service is built into the platform, the service cost becomes a Direct Cost that can be allocated to Perspective Groups.
The mix of direct and indirect costs leads to charges often being attributed to the wrong department, making cost allocation a time-consuming and complex process.
Both direct and indirect costs are tied to the account that generated the usage of the cloud asset. You can to reassign indirect costs from your bill by the proportion of direct costs within your Perspective Groups.
You can create cost reallocation rules to determine when indirect costs are charged to your account. These rules help you easily align charges across business groups using Perspectives, a task that would otherwise be extremely time-consuming.
Reallocation involves selecting a cost source and redistributing it among one or more cost destinations.
After you create and save a cost reallocation rule, it takes at least 24 hours for the reallocation results to be available in the cost reports.
For detailed examples of how to reallocate costs according to different scenarios, see How to Reallocate Cost.
A ruleset is a placeholder for one or more rules. The rules are run in the sequence in which they are ordered within a ruleset.
From the menu, select Setup > Cost Reallocation and click *New Ruleset.
Provide a Name and Description for the ruleset to help you identify it later. The ruleset is Enabled by default, and it becomes active as soon as you save it.
There are two types of sources:
The cost destination changes depending on your selection of the cost source. When there are no destination matches for cost reallocation, the cost is instead reallocated equally to each perspective group.
Make a selection to specify whether gross costs or net costs should be considered during reallocation. Net costs include credits, whereas gross costs do not.
The costs in the source being reallocated may include credits and are unaffected by your selection.
However, when this setting is switched on, any credits in the target are affected as follows and impact the ratios in which the reallocated costs are proportioned in the targets:
What happens to existing reallocation rulesets that were created prior to this option being available? Rulesets that you created before this setting was enabled will not account for credits during reallocation. You can enable this setting for existing rulesets and when you do, you will see one or more of the the following effects in your Cost History reports.
This is an optional step. By default, the Reallocate Across Accounts/Subscriptions is disabled. Based on your business requirement, you can enable the option.
Note that, once your enable the option -
For more information, see the How to Reallocate Cost article in the Tanzu CloudHealth knowledge base.
Get visibility into your VMware asset costs and derive insights from cost trends using Benchmark Pricing.
One of the challenges with operating in a VMware environment is having visibility into your costs and deriving insights from cost trends. Tanzu CloudHealth helps you discover and price your VMware assets so that you can develop insights from cost trends.
When you properly assess the cost of the Virtual Machines (VMs) in your VMware account, you can meaningfully allocate and bill machine usage costs to departments, teams, or individuals in your organization.
However, arriving at the cost of a machine is not straightforward. It requires knowledge of computing costs, computing capacity, and projected usage, all of which are variables that evolve as your VMware accounts grow.
The cost of a machine, data center, cluster, and host is defined by its cost drivers. Cost drivers are the criteria that make up the total cost of the machine, from the server hardware cost to fees for storage, licensing, maintenance, and so on.
To use benchmark pricing, update your VMware Aggregator to version 1.7.27.56 or later. If your Aggregator uses an earlier version, contact Tanzu CloudHealth Support.
Benchmark pricing uses the actual machine hardware costs according to industry standards to calculate asset costs. Benchmark pricing automatically assigns pricing to all your VMware accounts without requiring you to manually configure pricing for machines.
You can review what your daily benchmark pricing costs would look like before you enable benchmark pricing:
The theoretical daily benchmark cost appears in the Daily Cost column in the asset report. After you enable benchmark pricing, this column reports the actual daily cost.
The asset reports take 2 hours to reflect any changes to cost drivers and Benchmark Pricing.
Legacy customers must manually enable Benchmark Pricing. New customers are automatically enabled with Benchmark Pricing and can skip this step.
To see how benchmark pricing has priced your overall infrastructure after enabling benchmark pricing, go to Setup > Admin > Benchmark Pricing:
When you update a cost driver’s pricing, the Monthly Expense column takes up to 45 minutes to update to the correct amount.
The Comparison with Industry Benchmark column updates every 12 hours.
You can review your historical cost driver costs in the Cost Driver History report by going to Reports > Cost > Cost Driver History.
The Cost Driver History report takes 24-48 hours to reflect any changes to cost drivers and Benchmark Pricing.
The pricing automatically generated by benchmark pricing may not accurately reflect your cost driver costs. You can modify these costs as needed by going to Setup > Admin > Benchmark Pricing and selecting one of the following cost drivers:
The original benchmark pricing-generated cost is always displayed as the Reference Cost for each editable cost field.
Reference Cost updates every 12 hours.
To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your VMware licenses:
To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your VMware facilities:
Modify the monthly costs as needed.
Click Save.
To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your VMware maintenance:
Not all costs are accounted for in benchmark pricing cost drivers. For example, benchmark pricing cost drivers don’t factor in the cost of insurance. You can add additional costs for the following asset types:
To add an additional cost:
To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your VMware network:
To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your servers:
Depreciation is the calculation of how much and how fast an asset loses value over time. By default, the Server Hardware cost driver uses the Max of Double or Straight model over 5 years. To modify the depreciation calculation for server hardware:
(original cost - accumulated depreciation) / number of remaining depreciation years
(original cost - accumulated depreciation) / number of remaining depreciation years
or (original cost - accumulated depreciation) * (2 / number of depreciation years)
, whichever is greater.To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your VMware storage:
To modify the benchmark pricing assigned to your VMware labor costs:
By default, cost driver pricing modification applies to all your data centers. You can choose to modify cost driver pricing on a per-data center basis. This allows you to price a cost driver differently for different data centers.
To modify costs for all data centers, make sure Organization Default is selected from the Show Expense For dropdown in a cost driver.
You can modify a cost driver on a per-data center basis only if you are modifying the cost driver’s detailed cost. For example, you can modify the Network cost driver on a per-data center basis if the selected pricing method is Per Network Interface Controller, but not if the selected pricing method is Total Monthly Cost.
The modified data center now has a different price than the other data centers and is no longer grouped under Organization Default for the current cost driver.
If you select Organization Default from the Show Expense For dropdown for the current cost driver and modify the monthly cost, the data center you individually modified previously won’t be affected by your pricing changes. Once you have modified a data center’s cost, you cannot return it to the Organization Default grouping and must individually modify that data center’s costs in the future.
During Cost Engine runs, it can take up to 2 hours for the main Cost Drivers page to update for individual data center price modifications.
Get visibility into your costs and derive insights from cost trends
One of the challenges with operating in a data center environment is having visibility into your costs and deriving insights from cost trends. Tanzu CloudHealth provides you an easy way to discover and price your data center assets so that you can develop insights from cost trends.
When you properly assess the cost of the Virtual Machines (VMs), or machines, in your data center, you can meaningfully allocate and bill machine usage costs to departments, teams, or individuals in your organization.
However, arriving at the cost of a machine is not straightforward. It requires knowledge of computing costs, computing capacity, and projected usage, all of which are variables that evolve as your data center grows.
The cost of a machine is made up of two components: fixed cost and recurring cost.
Tanzu CloudHealth simplifies the computing and assignment of fixed and recurring costs through the simple pricing calculator.
For example, if you select the Month interval and then specify an OS maintenance cost of $8.00
, each machine in the selected account is allocated $8.00/month in OS maintenance.
You can allocate costs to machines in one of two ways.
Approach | When to Use |
---|---|
By Configuration | To itemize fixed and recurring costs that make up the total cost for each unique machine configuration. |
By Tags | To apply a flat cost for each tag key value. |
With this option, Tanzu CloudHealth identifies unique machine configurations in your data center environment. You can then itemize the fixed and recurring costs that make up the total cost for each unique machine configuration.
Tanzu CloudHealth applies your pricing mechanism to all unique machine configurations. 4. By default, Tanzu CloudHealth applies the new pricing from this point on. To attach the new price from the time the asset was first discovered by the Tanzu CloudHealth Aggregator, select Price Historically. Then click Save Prices.
Use this option to associate a cost with a specific tag key value for machines in your environment.
Environment:Development
is assigned the tag cht_vm_cost:$4.00/day
. Similarly, each machine under the selected account that is tagged as Environment:Production
is assigned the tag cht_vm_cost:$5.00/day
.The machine costs you specify appear immediately in the Asset report. From the left menu, select Assets > Machines.
Tanzu CloudHealth also reflects the new pricing in the Cost History report within 24 hours from when you save the new pricing.
If you did not select the Price Historically option when specifying the machine costs, the new prices appear in the Cost History report from this point on.
From the left menu, select Reports > Cost > History.
You can dive deeper into this report for further analysis. For example, you can modify the report Category to display costs by Datacenter.
You can then analyze how instance type costs have changed historically by analyzing the table below the chart.
Historical cost trends across VMware CSP Organizations
The Time Interval dimension that you select determines how the data is defined on the X-Axis:
VMware Cloud Cost by Months and Services
Understand cost saving opportunities by business group
Savings by Months and Cost Category Items
Discover unrealized opportunities and realized savings related to the use of EC2 or RDS reservations.
Choose from unique Dimensions that are only visible in a monthly interval.
Filters | Interval | X-Axis | Y-Axis | Category | Chart Type |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
+Perspectives | monthly | +Perspectives | EC2 Opportunities | +Perspective | bar |
Accounts | Accounts | EC2 Savings | Accounts | horizontal bar | |
Billing Accounts | Billing Accounts | RDS Opportunities | Billing Accounts | area | |
Cost Categories | Cost Categories | RDS Savings | Cost Categories | line | |
Months | :Cost Category Items | EC2 RI Coverage | :Cost Category Items | ||
Months | EC2 SP Coverage | Months | |||
EC2 Spot Coverage | |||||
EC2 On Demand Coverage | |||||
Effective EC2 Blended Discount Rate | |||||
Effective EC2 RI Discount Rate | |||||
Effective EC2 SP Discount Rate | |||||
EC2 Savings from RIs | |||||
EC2 Savings from SPs |
These Y-Axis dimensions are defined as follows:
Daily costs trends and cost drivers for the current billing period
This report appears only for Partners and Partner Customers.
The billing period is determined by the invoice date your in Microsoft Azure account.
Daily cost trend and cost drivers for the previous billing period
This report appears only for Partners and Partner Customers.
The billing period is determined by the invoice date in your Microsoft Azure account.
Analyze cost history by months and service items
Cost History by Months and Service Items
Create historical trend analyses to evaluate data.
The Time Interval dimension that you select determines how the data is defined on the X-Axis:
Negative values in this report correspond to credits that you receive from your cloud provider.
Note Effective December 15, 2023, Google Cloud product names and SKU descriptions changed from
egress
oringress
todata transfer
. The new names will include modifying terms such asoutbound
orout
andinbound
orin
. The Tanzu CloudHealth platform report labels have been updated historically to reflect the latest product names of Google Cloud. For more details, see the Renaming Egress to Data Transfer FAQ section.
Costs by product for each invoice month according to the Google invoice
The GCP Cost History report and the History Invoice report are similar in content and use the same data source, the BigQuery export. On GCP console, these reports are accessed by selecting either Usage date or Invoice month for the Time range.
However, there are several key differences between the two reports. As a result, monthly cost totals are not expected to match between the two reports.
Cost History | Invoice History | |
---|---|---|
Data Source | Usage Start Time column in the BigQuery Export | Invoice Month column in the BigQuery export |
Granularity | Monthly, weekly, and daily | Monthly |
Included Costs | Does not include taxes and invoice adjustments | Includes taxes and invoice adjustments |
Expected Use Case | View daily cost trends | View monthly chargebacks |
Analyze compute engine cost by machine type
Report Settings - Category: Product Categories
Locate which product categories have the highest compute costs.
Report Settings
Gain visibility into costs that are categorized without a machine type.
Report data for ECS Fargate tasks
You can create Perspectives for Elastic Container Service (ECS) Fargate tasks. Using the AWS tags attached to these assets, the Fargate and associated costs are distributed to the Perspective groups. These Perspectives can be used for the report query.
Navigate to Reports > Cost > History. Under Filters, click on AWS Services to select the following options under Amazon Elastic Container Service - Direct and click Update.
In the resulting report, you can view the spend related to Fargate tasks effective from current month onwards. Historical data will not be available.
You can drill down each report by clicking on the cost value to view the resource details. The entry under SyntheticId indicates the aggregation of Fargate resources and tasks based on tags and other relevant columns.
Analyze trends in EC2 Instances by type
Instance Cost by Days and Reservation Type
View your EC2 instance costs by days and reservation type. This report allows you to see the costs of your reservation types of On Demand, Partial Upfront, No Upfront, Spot, and All Upfront.
You can also see legacy reservation types like heavy, medium, or light, if they are still part of your infrastructure. You can also view instance usage by the instance type such as t1.micro
or r3.large
. Because you can select or deselect each type, you can focus on exactly the data that is most important to you.
Understand data transfer costs and discover opportunities for reducing them
This report provides data for per byte charges. Use the Cost History report for reporting on processing (per connection) and provisioning (per hour) charges.
AWS documentation refers to per byte charges in NAT Gateway as processing. These NAT Gateway processing (i.e. per byte) charges can be viewed in this report.
Click on the dropdown for Category and select AWS Services to display a report on transfer costs incurred by all AWS services.
Click on the dropdown for Category and select Destination Locations to display a report based on the destination location of the file transfer.
Click on the dropdown for Category and select Origin Locations to display a report based on the source location of the file transfer.
Click on the dropdown for Category and select Transfer Type to display a report on regional file transfers and file transfers over the internet.
Understand DynamoDB costs by cost type
DynamoDB Cost by Months and Accounts
DynamoDB cost reporting allows you to look at a number of factors for costs: data transfer costs, provisioned costs, reserved costs, and unused reserved costs categorized by Accounts, Regions, or Weeks.
Current cost by Accounts and Services Items for current month
Current Cost by Accounts and Services Items for current month
Study a single time period and analyze data by X-Axis and Categories.
Historical trend of spending by cost driver type in your data center.
This report is only available if you have enabled Benchmark Pricing for your VMware accounts.
Analyze trends in your actual spend and track it against your budget
Actual - Budget
) and rollover trend?Report Settings
Visualize your spend trend as a percentage of budget.
Report Settings
If you have in place a budget categorized by Perspective in the Platform, you can visualize the budget vs. actual trend for that Perspective.
If you have budgets categorized by multiple Perspectives, this report allows you to select only the Perspective for which the categorized budget was updated most recently.
Historical trends for Azure storage costs
Analyze historical cost trends by type
Variations: Specify a different Time Interval dimension to determine how the data is defined on the X-Axis:
Negative values in this report correspond to credits that you receive from your cloud provider.
Analyze costs by type for the current month
Compare budgeted spend with actual spend, analyze trends and variance
Actual - Budget
) and rollover trend?Report Settings
Visualize your spend trend as a percentage of budget.
Report Settings
If you have in place a budget categorized by Perspective in the Platform, you can visualize the budget vs. actual trend for that Perspective.
If you have budgets categorized by multiple Perspectives, this report allows you to select only the Perspective for which the categorized budget was updated most recently.
Compare budgeted spend with actual spend, analyze trends and variance for GCP
Actual - Budget
?You can also visualize your spend trend as a percentage of budget, by choosing By % of Budget under Display Graph.
Report Settings
Data Interval: Month range selection in Specific time period section
If you have in place a budget categorized by Perspective in the Platform, you can visualize the budget vs. actual trend for that Perspective.
If you have budgets categorized by multiple Perspectives, this report allows you to select only the Perspective for which the categorized budget was updated most recently.
Access Big Query cost reports generated by FlexReports.
By choosing Perspective for Category, you can access dedicated pre-build report to understand the spend better.
Introspect trend of amortized costs, including costs for reserved VMs
Variations: In the Category dropdown, specify a category such as Regions. The report shows you amortization by those categories so that you can analyze trends.
Report Settings
Determine which functions (or similar Perspective) are incurring the highest and lowest amortized cost each month.
Variations: In the Category dropdown, specify a Perspective Group such as Environment or Team. The report shows you amortization by those Perspectives so that you can analyze trends.
Azure Amortized Cost report provides better accuracy and scalability.
Amortized Report | Amortized Cost Report | |
---|---|---|
How is the Amortized cost calculated | Tanzu CloudHealth back calculates amortization costs based on reservation cost and usage data. | Tanzu CloudHealth utilizes the Cost Management APIs to access amortized costs from Microsoft, providing better accuracy and scalability. |
Amortization Data | Only includes Virtual Machines amortization data. | Includes amortization data for additional reservable resources too. |
Upfront Charges | Amortizing the upfront chargesunder Virtual Machines. | Amortizing the upfront charges under VM Reservation Orders - Upfront category. |
Feature Support | Supported in the Custom Line Item and Cost Reallocation rules. | Not supported in the Custom Line Item and Cost Reallocation rules. |
Service Principal | enrollmentreader role is not required. |
Must have enrollmentreader role. |
To view this report, you must update the Service Principal to contain the ‘enrollmentreader’ role. For more information on how to assign an ‘enrollmentreader’ role to the Service Principal, see Configuring an Enterprise Agreement Azure Account.
Filters: Services Interval: Monthly X-Axis: Months Y-Axis: Amortized Cost by Usage ($) Category: Service Category Chart Type: Bar
Amortized Cost by Usage: View Amortized cost distributed across subscriptions, VM series, enrollments, regions etc.
For all reservations, the report displays the amortized cost of reservation mapped to the respective Subscription and Region. For unused RIs, the amortized cost will be shown under the Other category in the report.
View your monthly statements from AWS for every item billed
This report lists your monthly statements from AWS for every item billed. Click the View icon next to a statement to see a general overview of that statement.
You can also download the following reports as CSV files.
Review the “fully loaded” expense for a period, including the amortization of all reservable AWS services supported.
The Amortization Report provides the following insights:
Support for billing rules
Reservation prepay charges and Savings Plan upfront fees are filtered out of the Amortization report.
Amazon Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
Report Settings
Analyze trends in Virtual Machine costs
Analyze trends in SQL Database costs
Analyze trends for S3 costs
S3 Costs by Days and Accounts
Reporting on S3 provides cost information regarding your S3 storage. S3 is billed by the amount of storage used, as well as the amount of data transferred out.
The totals within this report reflect the cost of data transfer as well as storage. You can select other options as well, such as API costs, costs by bucket, and/or Glacier storage costs.
Analyze cost trends for RDS instances and costs covered by reservations
Variations: Swap out Accounts in the Category dropdown with Owner, Environment, or other Perspectives. The report shows you cost trends by those Perspectives so you can analyze spend by team, project, or infrastructure owner.
Report Settings
Determine which types of RDS instances are being used across teams, projects, and accounts.
Report Settings
Analyze on-demand versus reservation-based cost trend for the AWS RDS service. Get a quick understanding of the potential for making additional reservation purchases to reduce costs.
Analyze costs by project for the current month
Analyze trends in the cost of EBS volumes
Volume Cost by Days and EBS Volume Status
EC2 Volume reporting gives you insight into your volume costs. This report allows you to see the costs of your volumes based on your defined perspectives, EBS Volume Status, volume type, or even availability zone.
For example, this report is configured to display the volume cost by financial group. It shows the cost of volumes across Production, Development, and Test. There is also a catchall for assets not allocated.
Analyze trends in amortized cost of Virtual Machine RIs
Variations: In the Category dropdown, specify a category such as Enrollment or Subscriptions. The report shows you amortization by those categories for the reserved VM’s enrollments, subscriptions, etc. so that you can analyze trends.
Report Settings
Determines the amortized cost of purchased reservations.
Variations:
In the Category dropdown, specify a category such as Enrollment or Accounts. The report shows you amortization by those categories for the reservation’s enrollments, accounts, etc. so that you can analyze trends. Note that if a reservation is purchased through a Shared subscription, the enrollment for that reservation appears as Other in the graph.
Report Settings
Determine which owners are incurring the highest and lowest amortized cost each month.
Variations In the Category dropdown, specify a Perspective Group such as Environment or Function. The report shows you amortization by those Perspectives so that you can analyze trends.
Explanation on how recurring RIs in AWS are apportioned
Tanzu CloudHealth apportions all recurring Reserved Instances (RIs) to provide you the total cost of ownership for a service or a business grouping. With apportioning enabled, the recurring cost (different from the upfront cost) of all your RIs is included in the hourly fee calculation for each usage line item in the AWS bill. This is particularly useful for chargebacks and showbacks.
For example, you bought an EC2 reservation a year ago at the rate of $2/hr for a period of three years, and another EC2 reservation six months ago, at the rate of $1/hr for a period of one year. Both these reservations are currently active. If you use an applicable instance today, you will receive a line in the bill acknowledging the use and displaying $0 for the cost. While this method accurately reflects the cost for Full Upfront RIs, it is not accurate for No Upfront and Partial Upfront RIs. Apportioning associates the recurring RI cost to your usage allowing fully loaded cost to be allocated to your perspective groups.
The enhanced reports can be accessed at the following UI tabs:
Consider the following example of an ElastiCache report filtered by Reservation Type, where apportioning was enabled starting May 2022.
Before May 2022, the usage of any No Upfront RI is acknowledged but is not billed under the correct category. The cost related to this usage is displayed under the Unknown section of the report.
Starting May 2022, with apportioning enabled, the cost of all No Upfront RIs used is correctly allocated to the usage. The accurate cost of the RIs used is displayed in the No Upfront row of the report table.
Consider the following example of an Elasticsearch report, where apportioning was enabled in May 2022.
Before May 2020, the charges related to the use of compute resources is considered while calculating other Indirect Charges and is displayed under Indirect Charges > Elasticsearch-Other.
With apportioning enabled starting May 2022, the correct cost of all compute resources used is calculated and displayed under the Elasticsearch-Compute section of the report.
Analyze trends in the balance remaining from the original enrollment commitments
Description of common Y-axis measures in Reports
This measure shows the Amortized Cost of all reservation purchases and Savings Plan costs. The data source for this measure is the AWS Cost and Usage report (CUR). Tanzu CloudHealth does not calculates this value, instead only aggregating it over the time period that you select in your report. This measure can be used in addition to other cost metrics such as Cost or Recurring costs to provide a “fully loaded” operating cost.
Also see Reports > Cost > Amortization. This preset report includes all AWS Services, except reservation prepay charges and Savings Plan upfront fees, plus Amortization. Amortized Cost supports Billing Rules.
Tanzu CloudHealth calculates the Projected Cost as the sum of the following individual costs:
(Number of days remaining in the current month) x (Weighted average of previous and current month's recurring costs)
. The assumption here is that for every day in the remainder of the month, the daily average recurring costs will be similar to those incurred in the previous month / MTD costs.This measure shows EC2 compute service only and recalculates the hourly usage to show the cost as if all non-spot EC2 instance usage had been charged at On Demand pricing, without the benefit of applicable RIs. This is a great way of seeing the savings impact of making RI purchases for EC usage.
This measure takes Total Costs and removes Prepaid RIs, Support Costs, and other one-time program or other one time fees to provide a view of your ongoing operational costs.
This measure includes all AWS Service Items as they appear on your AWS invoice. This includes ongoing services like EC2 Compute, EBS, RDS and S3 storage (and all other services) as well as specific charges such as Prepaid RI payments, AWS program and Support Fees. This provides you with a “cash” view of what you are being charged for by AWS in a given period. Please note that some manual billing adjustments may not be included in your detailed billing report by AWS and thus not reflected. Also, some charges are billed as of the 1st day of a given month (i.e. Support).
Cost without support for Cost Reallocation.
Note Effective December 15, 2023, Google Cloud product names and SKU descriptions changed from
egress
oringress
todata transfer
. The new names will include modifying terms such asoutbound
orout
andinbound
orin
. The Tanzu CloudHealth platform report labels have been updated historically to reflect the latest product names of Google Cloud. For more details, see the Renaming Egress to Data Transfer FAQ section.
Analyze historical cost trends by type
The new GCP Cost History report and the History Invoice report are similar in content and use the same data source, the BigQuery export. However, there are several key differences between the two reports. As a result, monthly cost totals are not expected to match between the two reports.
Cost History | Invoice History | |
---|---|---|
Data Source | Usage Start Time column in the BigQuery Export | Invoice Month column in the BigQuery export |
Granularity | Monthly, weekly, and daily | Monthly |
Included Costs | Does not include taxes and invoice adjustments | Includes taxes and invoice adjustments |
Expected Use Case | View daily cost trends | View monthly chargebacks |
Daily costs trends and cost drivers for the current billing period
The billing period is determined by the invoice date in your VMware Cloud Services’ account.
Navigate to Reports > Cost > Current Billing Period.
Daily cost trend and cost drivers for the previous billing period
What are main drivers of cost for the current billing period?
The billing period is determined by the invoice date in your VMware Cloud services’ account.
Navigate to Reports > Cost > Previous Billing Period.
Analyze historical cost trends by type
Even though Oracle Bills are uploaded daily, it is observed that the billing data can be T-2 days old. Therefore, you might see a delay of up to 2 days in the Oracle daily cost reports data. For example, a bill generated on July 8th will have data only up to July 5th. This is expected behavior.
Switch the Cost report view between Daily, Monthly, and Weekly. Your Interval selection determines how the data is defined on the X-Axis:
You can use the following standard filter options to view the report as per your business needs.
You can segregate the spend on Monthly Flex and Pay As You Go (PAYG) using ‘Reservation Type’ in the category.
Compare budget vs. actual spend and analyze trends in actual spend
Report Settings
Select By % of Budget in Display Graph and click Update to visualize your spend trend as a percentage of the budget.
Report Settings
Select Data Interval and click Update to see data for a specified time period.
If you have configured a budget categorized by perspective in the Platform, you can visualize the budget vs. actual trend for that perspective.
Select a perspective from the Budget dropdown, select the perspective groups from the Group dropdown , and click Update.
If you have budgets categorized by multiple perspectives, this report allows you to select only the perspective for which the categorized budget was updated most recently.
Switch the Cost report view between Daily, Monthly, and Weekly. Your Interval selection determines how the data is defined on the X-Axis:
You can use the following standard filter options to view the report as per your business needs.
Cost History by Months and Services
Chart Type: Bar