Analyzing costs by business service


Use the By Business Service page to get a quick summary of your costs per business service and to understand and analyze the cost details for a specific business service. The By Business Service page displays the monthly costs per business service for the public cloud platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, and for your on-premises private cloud. 

You can drill down into a business service to view details of the associated cost. 

From the By Business Service page, you can achieve the following goals: 

  • Identify and analyze the business services with high costs.
  • Identify the business services with high CPU utilization.
  • Analyze and investigate the cost of a specific business service.
  • View and compare the monthly cloud costs by business service.
  • View the daily and monthly costs for a business service by cloud service provider.
  • View and compare the monthly costs of all resources that a business service uses.
  • View detailed bill (bill line items) for every business service. 

For more information, see the following sections:

Reference information


Definitions (Business service, Resource)

Business service: An IT service that directly supports a business process. For example, financial services, online banking services delivered by banks to its customers, or Human Resource (HR) services delivered by an HR department.

Resource: An entity or a service of a cloud provider or in the on-premises data center that users can work with. For example, physical servers, virtual machines, storage devices, containers. 

Why analyze business service costs?

As a service owner in an organization, you might be interested in knowing the costs associated with the different business services.

Consider an example:

The IT department of an organization provides IT related services to all the employees. These IT services are the business services of the IT department.

To provide these services, the organization or department requires IT resources such as virtual machines, servers, databases, storage devices, and so on. These resources could be provisioned in the public cloud or in the organization's on-premises data center.

As a service owner, you would like to know whether a business service is too expensive, or is not consuming enough resources that are assigned to it, or needs more resources for better functioning or to support more demand. By using the cost data for the business service, you can decide whether you need to provision more resources for the service or reduce the resources.

Before you begin

Ensure that business service data for your public clouds and on-premises data center are already imported. For more information, see Collecting-business-service-data

The following image shows a few examples of business services as displayed in the Capacity Optimization Workspace:

business_service_hierarchy.png

To analyze costs by business service

  1.  In the navigation pane of the TrueSight console, select Cloud Cost Control and click the By Business Service tab. 

    The By Business Service page displays the costs and other details for all the business services. The most expensive service is listed first. By default, the costs for the current month are displayed. 
    ccp_bs_tab.png
     

View a quick cost summary of all the business services

    1. Review the following business service details: 

      Column

      Description

      Name

      Name of the business service that uses the resources of the cloud provider. To drill down into detailed cost analysis of a business service, click the name. The Business Service Cost Details page is displayed.

      Cost [$]

      Monthly cost of the resources used by the business service.

      Number of instances

      Number of active or running instances of resources that are assigned to the business service.

      Normalized compute hours


      Approximate number of hours of compute time used by the instances that are assigned to the business service. This value gives an estimate of the size of the business service.

      This metric is displayed only for compute-related services and resources.

      For more information about normalized compute hours, see Normalized-compute-hours-overview.

      CPU utilization [%]

      CPU utilization of the instances that are assigned to the business service. This value indicates whether the business service is optimally utilizing the assigned resources or not.

      Provider

      Cloud provider that hosts the resources that are assigned to the business service. A business service might have resources provisioned on more than one cloud provider.

        

    2. To view the cost for a specific provider only or for a specific month, use the global filters:
      Global filters:
       ccp_quickfilters.png
      1. Cloud Provider quick filter: Click a cloud provider button to show or hide the provider's data on the page.
      2. Monthly filter: Click the monthly filter to select a specific month for which you want to view the data.
      info.pngInfo: By default, the page displays data for the current month and for all available cloud providers. The options that you select in the global filters (Cloud Provider quick filter, Monthly filter) apply to all the page elements (table and charts).

  1. Drill down into a business service for details


    1. In the By Business Service page, click the business service name for the service that you want to investigate and view details for.
      The Business Service Cost Details page opens that provides cost and other details for the selected business service such as the average monthly and projected yearly costs, the number of instances, normalized instance hours, provider, and CPU utilization. The page also displays the following charts:

      Chart

      Description

      Daily Costs

      A stacked area graph that enables you to compare the daily usage costs of the cloud providers for the business service. 

      Monthly Cost by Category

      A pie chart that enables you to get a quick comparative view of the cost of the different cloud services, grouped by service categories. 

      Monthly Costs 

      A chart that displays the cost breakup for the selected business service for the past and future months, based on the selected month.  

      The cost details are based on the selected month. If you change the month and year, the cost data changes accordingly.ccp_bsd_summary.png

    2. To know details of the resources that are assigned to the selected business service or to identify the resources with higher costs, click the By Resource tab. 
    3. Review the following column values in the By Resource page: 

      Column

      Description

      Resource

      Name of the resource. To drill down into detailed cost analysis of a resource, click the name. The Bill details page is displayed.

      Total Cost [$]

      Total cost of the resource that the business service uses over the selected month.

      Provider

      Cloud provider that the resource is associated with.

      Cloud Service

      Cloud service that uses the associated resource.

      Normalized Compute Hours

      Approximate number of hours of compute time used by the instances that are assigned to the business service. This value gives an estimate of the size of the business service.

      This metric is displayed only for compute-related services and resources.

      For more information about normalized compute hours, see Normalized-compute-hours-overview.

      Instance Type

      A specification that defines the resources (CPU, memory, and storage) for an instance. For example. m1.small, m1.large.

      Region

      Region where the resource is located. Region value is not populated for a business service that uses the on-premises infrastructure systems.

      Account Name

      Name of the account that is associated with the account identifier.

      Account Identifier

      A unique identifier assigned to the account that owns the resource. This identifier is assigned by the cloud provider.

      In case of AWS, it is the 12-digit account ID. For Azure, it is the subscription ID.

      ccp_bsd_resource.png

    4. To investigate further into a resource, click the resource name. 
      The Bill Details page is displayed that provides a line-by-line detailed bill of the costs associated with the selected resource. The page displays following details for the selected resource:

      Column

      Description

      Resource

      Name of the selected resource.

      Cost [$]

      Cost of the resource for a specific operation as indicated by the associated date and time stamp.

      Date

      Date when the resource is used for the associated operation.

      Provider

      Cloud provider that the resource is associated with.

      Category

      Cloud service category that the cloud service belongs to.

      Cloud Service

      Cloud service that uses the associated resource.

      Instance Type

      A specification that defines the resources (CPU, memory, and storage) for an instance. For example. m1.small, m1.large.

      For more information about normalized instance hours, see TrueSight-Cloud-Cost-Control-overview.

      Usage Type


      The type of usage that is covered by this line item. If you paid for a Reserved Instance, the report has one line that shows the monthly committed cost, and multiple lines that show a charge of 0.

      Usage


      Indicates the time in number for which the resource is used for the specific operation. The value in this field along with the Unit value provides you the right indicator of the resource usage.

      Unit


      Indicates the unit of time for which the resources is used for the specific operation. For example, hours, minutes, days.

      Operation

      Activity or operation for which the selected resource is used.

      Region

      Region where the selected resource is located.

      Account Name


      Name of the account associated with the account identifier.

      Account Identifier

      A unique identifier assigned to the account that owns the resource. This identifier is assigned by the cloud provider.

      In case of AWS, it is the 12-digit account ID. For Azure, it is the subscription ID.

      Description

      Specific cost description of how much of the total cost is used by an instance type.

      ccp_bsd_bill.png

      You can directly view bill details for all the resources by clicking the Bill details tab. Use the Resource filter to view details for a specific resource.

    5. To simulate the migration of a business service, click Simulate Cloud Migration. For more information, see Estimating-the-cost-of-migrating-servers-to-the-public-cloud.

Video - Viewing all business services and their associated costs

The following video (5:19) provides a view of all business services and their associated costs, along with a detailed view of the resources that are using each service.

icon-play.pnghttps://youtu.be/x9yYA9aWg5E

 

 

 

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