Usage scenarios
What's my monthly IBM bill breakdown?
Challenge:
A company executive wants to know what the IBM software bill was for the last month and how it is distributed between different products or CPCs. The IBM SCRT report provides only Peak R4HA values, but does not provide actual cost. The actual bill from IBM typically arrives two months after report was submitted.
Cost Management solution:
After updating the company cost coefficients in the MSU Cost Editor, the MLC Monthly Summary Report provides the total cost and its absolute and relative components in a clear and concise form.
Which LPAR is costing me the most?
Challenge:
A budget planner needs to know which LPARs contributed the most to the total cost of a product on a particular CPC.
Cost Management solution:
Clicking the R4HA MSU Utilization preview chart of this CPC displays the LPAR view of this CPC for a particular MLC Product. Each LPAR's activity is displayed only during the intervals where the selected product was active.
How can the report help me know how to reduce costs?
Challenge:
An administrator needs to cut the IT consumption costs by 10%.
Cost Management solution:
By analyzing the MLC Monthly Summary Report, the administrator discovers that the First Peak R4HA is significantly higher than the Second Peak R4HA. BMC AMI Cost Management provides a possibility to investigate the period around the first peak and determine what LPARs contributed to it.
After determining what factors contributed to the differences in the peaks, use the MLC Planning tool to determine which workloads were executed on these LPARs at that time. If this is a normal situation, (that is, the peak was not caused by an accidental, 'runaway' program), the administrator can reduce the cost by moving some work or imposing a Defined Capacity limit.
This option can be further researched in the MLC Planning tool. For more information, see Developing-cost-reduction-plans.