Cost is what you spend in currency value on managing and maintaining your infrastructure. Total Cost gives you an idea about the overall cost of ownership of your infrastructure. You can analyze cost metrics like Total Cost, Potential Savings, Realized Savings and so on, for your infrastructure that includes, VMs, hosts, and clusters. You can use lists and compare between selected objects types. For example, you can view the Top 10 VMs within a datacenter based on Total Cost for the last month or you can compare Cost Center A, Cost Center B, and Cost Center C based on Total Cost for the past 6 months.

How Cost Analysis Helps

Some use cases for cost analysis are as follows:
  • Financial reporting helps IT teams justify the expenses they incur to the finance team. It helps track expenses across private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS, and public clouds.
  • To drive accountability for resource usage, you can view the cost of infrastructure at the VM level. You can generate a bill for your usage and drive accountability within the application teams.
  • Your infrastructure operations teams may want to quantify savings through reclamation or revoking of resources like idle VMs, snapshots, and so on. In VMware Aria Operations you can see such resources and view the price associated with them. Reclaimable or right sizeable resources have a cost associated that can be seen as Potential Savings.
  • Realized Savings covers the cost savings from reclamation opportunities recommended by VMware Aria Operations.

Metrics and Objects You Can Run Cost Analysis For

Objects for Cost metrics (Total Cost, Realized Saving, Potential Saving, MTD Cost, and Monthly Projected Total Cost):

  • vCenter (all objects that have Cost: VM, Host, Cluster, Data Center, Resource Pools, and Datastore)
  • CloudHealth (all key objects that have Cost: Services, Accounts, Regions, and so on)
  • Horizon (all key objects that have Cost or are introducing Cost in this release – User, Session, VDI Pool, and RDS Farm)
  • Container (Business Apps and Custom Groups)

    Note: For Custom Groups, it is the summary of Total Cost of all VMs under that custom group.

Where You Find Cost Analysis

In the left menu, click Cost > Analyze. The Cost Analysis page opens on the right. Click Analyse on the Cost tile to create an analysis. For more information about creating an analysis, see New or Edit Cost Analysis.