Defining and managing the on-premises costs

Use the Cost Settings page to define the monthly costs of instances (VMs or standalone systems) in your on-premises environment, and to define the typical hardware configuration (CPU, memory, and storage) of instances so as to group them by instance types.

The Cost Settings page contains the default cost rates of factors that are considered to compute the cost of an on-premises instance. These default cost rates are estimated by using the Cost Estimator spreadsheet. You can download the spreadsheet and provide details of your environment to estimate your monthly cost rates.

For more information, see the following sections:

Tabs on the Cost Settings page

The Cost Settings page has two tabs (On-premises Costs and On-premises Instance Types) that enable you to complete the following two tasks:

Click a tab for corresponding details.

Define on-premises costs
Define on-premises instance types

The cost of an instance is computed based on various factors such as compute, storage, network, virtualization system, database, operating system, and so on. The default cost rates of these factors are available out-of-the-box when you install the product. You can modify the default cost rates in the On-premises Costs tab. You can also specify generic cost that the predefined factors do not account for.

For a detailed procedure, see Defining on-premises costs.

The default cost estimates of these factors are estimated by using the Cost Estimator spreadsheet. The spreadsheet contains the on-premises environment characteristics such as number of hosts, number of VMs, and so on, that are considered to estimate the default cost rates. You can download the spreadsheet and modify the values as per your requirement to re-estimate the costs.

You can view the updated costs of the instances on the Bill details page. For example, on the By Cloud Service page.

Instances with the same hardware configuration (CPU, memory, storage) can be grouped together as instance types. You can define these groups (instance types) in the On-premises Instance Types tab.

These instance types can be used as a dimension to analyze the costs of your on-premises infrastructure. For example, you can determine the cost of an on-premises service that is using instances of a specific instance type (Explore page).

To see how, click here

By default, the page contains the following instance types:

Default Instance types	#CPU	Memory	Storage
micro	1	1	30
small	1	2	30
medium	2	4	60
large	2	8	90
xlarge	4	16	120
2xlarge	8	32	240

You can modify the configuration of these instance types and add more instance types to the list. For more information, see Defining on-premises instance types.

Note

Based on the costs that you define for the Resource allocation factors in the On-premises Costs tab, the minimum cost per instance type is computed and displayed in the Base Cost column per instance type. The cost is an indication of the base cost of an on-premises instance that has the same hardware configuration as that defined in the instance type. The actual cost of the instance considers the other factors such as licensing costs, and so on, and hence, might differ.

To define and manage the cost of an on-premises instance

Ensure that you have the required permissions to edit the Cost Settings page. For more information, see Authorizing-users-to-access-TrueSight-Cloud-Cost-Control.

Log on to the TrueSight console.
Expand the left navigation pane and select Cloud Cost Control.
The Cloud Cost Control page is displayed.
Click Settings > Cost Settings.
The Cost Settings page is displayed. The On-premises Costs tab is open by default.
Click the Cost Settings action menu and select Edit.

The page refreshes and all the fields on the page are displayed in edit mode.

Modify the cost rates of the factors or specify additional factors:

Tip

Download and use the Cost Estimator spreadsheet to specify your on-premises environment details and estimate the cost rates of the factors.

Factor	Description
Resource Allocation	Specify the monthly cost of the system resources: Physical CPU - Specify the cost for a physical or standalone computer. Virtual CPU Memory Storage
Virtualization Platform	Specify the monthly cost per server for one or more virtualization platforms: Click + Add Platform. Select a platform from the list. Specify the cost.
Operating System	Specify the monthly cost of one or more operating systems: Click + Add Operating System. Select an operating system from the list. Specify the cost.
Custom Costs	Specify the generic costs that the other factors cannot account for. You can specify this cost as a fixed value (Fixed) or as a percentage (Percentage) of the overall monthly cost of your on-premises infrastructure. For example, the salaries of the IT department members who maintain the on-premises infrastructure.

Click Save.
The Cost Settings page is saved with the changes that you made. These settings are applied from the day you make the changes. If you want to apply the changes to the past data, you can trigger a manual refresh of the data. For more information, see Manually-recovering-historical-costs.

To define and manage the on-premises instance types

Log on to the TrueSight console.
Expand the left navigation pane and select Cloud Cost Control.
The Cloud Cost Control page is displayed.
Click Settings > Cost Settings.
The Cost Settings page is displayed. The On-premises Cost tab is open by default.
Click the On-premises Instance Type tab.
The On-premises Instance Types page is displayed.
Click Cost Settings action menu and select Edit.

The page refreshes and is displayed in edit mode.
To add a new instance type, click + Add Instance Type and specify the values for the following properties:
- Name: Specify a name for the instance type that you are defining.
- #CPU: Specify the number of CPU cores
- Memory: Specify the memory value in GB.
- Storage: Specify the disk size in GB.
To modify the properties of an existing instance type, click in the box of the property that you want to change and specify the new value.
To remove an existing instance type, click the corresponding x button.
Click Save.
The Cost Settings page is saved with the changes that you made. Based on the cost definition under the Resource Allocation section in the On-premises Costs tab, the minimum cost per instance type is computed and displayed in the Base Cost column.
The base cost does not consider the licensing costs for the virtualization platform and operating system.

Where to go from here

Analyzing-and-forecasting-multi-cloud-costs