The Cloud Billing report provides full cost visibility by showing historical data for all services, including services that Commander does not manage, so all of your cloud costs are included in one report. Service providers can use this to generate accurate billing reports for their customers. The Cloud Billing report includes private cloud accounts. For more information on setting report options, see Running and Scheduling Reports.
This report is based on historical billing data that's retrieved nightly. To learn how to retrieve historical billing data, see:
- Retrieve Historical Data for vCenter Cloud Accounts
- AWS Billing Data
- Retrieve Azure Billing Data
- Retrieve GCP Billing Data
Costs in this report are calculated using the current cost model. For objects no longer associated with a cloud account, Commander uses the global default cost model for cost calculations.
- Taxes are not shown on the Cloud Billing report for Azure.
- In some cases, the services listed in the report may not exactly match those shown in public cloud providers' management portals. Any discrepancies reflect the difference between the service type names providers use for their APIs and those customer-facing names that they present in their Web portals.
Storage costs for Azure shared disks are allocated based on VM ownership. If multiple VMs that reference a shared disk are assigned to different organizations, or to primary owners from different organizations, the cost for the shared disk is assigned to the organization that comes first alphabetically. If a VM that references a shared disk has multiple primary owners, the username that comes first alphabetically is considered the sole primary owner for determining cost allocation.
Report settings
Access: | Reports > Chargeback & IT Costing > Cloud Billing or Views > Cost Analytics > Cloud Billing Report |
Available to: | All Access Rights Levels |
During: Specify a time period for the report.
- When you select By Period, the period will be the last completed timespan. For example, if the current month is May and you select Last 3 Months, the range for the report will be February, March, and April.
For more information, see Time Range Filters
- When you select By Dates, Commander populates the From Date field with the earliest date available for the selection; this is the date that the first historical data was added to Commander.
embotics.http.security.headerCloud Type: Select private cloud, public cloud, or all cloud types. The cloud type you select will determine the availability of your cloud accounts.
Organization: If you are generating a billing report for a particular customer, you likely want to filter the report by organization.
- Any Organization: VMs that aren't assigned to an organization are excluded from the results.
- All VMs/Services: The report includes all VMs and services, regardless of organizational assignment.
- Default Organization: The report includes all VMs and services assigned to Commander's default organization.
You can also select a particular organization from the list. If you want to use a "contains" operator or filter on multiple organizations, use the advanced filter Organization Name instead.
Cost Adjustments — If you want the report to show your actual costs, keep the default of None. If you want the report to reflect any markups and discounts that you have set, select Include Markups and Discounts. This report can be shared with Service Portal users in the Published Reports section. When Service Portal users view this report with adjusted values, they won't see any indication that the costs are marked-up or discounted.
If you include Markups and Discounts in this report, you may want to add a comment in the Comment section to remind yourself that these costs are adjusted. Service Portal users will see the comment if they view the report, so the comment should be something that does not reveal that these are adjusted costs. For example: "Customer Report".
Currency: Select the currency for the report. The default setting will be your preferred currency setting. All costs shown in the report will be converted to this currency. You can also select No Conversion and costs in the report will be grouped based on their original native currencies.
Exchange Rate:
- Select Actual Historical to use exchange rates that are provided by the European Central Bank.
- Select Fixed Rates from USD to enter custom exchange rates. This is useful if you want to use a fixed exchange rate for monthly reports to customers.
These options aren't available if you selected No Conversion for currency.
- Enter the exchange rate from USD for the currency you selected in the Currency dropdown menu above.
- Enter the exchange rates from USD for the native currencies that are associated with any registered cloud accounts you're using in the report.
For example, if you want the costs for your report to be in India Rupees (INR), and the cloud account you want to show has the native currency in Swedish Krona (SEK), the entry into the field would be 73.1211 INR, 8.29599 SEK.
In the Fixed Rates from USD field, exchange rate numbers must be positive, with a maximum of 8 decimals, and currency codes must be valid. Rates must be separated using either a comma or a new line. Rates must be before currency codes and there must be a space between the rate and the code.
Invalid exchange rate syntax will result in an error message and missing exchange rates will result in a blank report containing an error message.
Here are some valid and invalid examples of Fixed Rate field formatting.
Valid Examples |
|---|
1.42 CAD |
12.3 KRW, 1.42 CAD, 0.7 EUR |
12.3 KRW 1.42 CAD 0.7 EUR |
Invalid Examples | Invalid because |
|---|---|
1.42 Canadian Dollars | Invalid currency code |
$ 1.42 | Invalid currency code |
EUR 0.7 | Currency code before rate number |
-0.7 EUR | Negative rate number |
12.3KRW | Missing space between rate and code |
12.3 KRW 1.42 CAD 0.7 EUR | Missing commas between rates |
Group By: Select a billing tag for grouping the report data. For example, you can group by cost center. If the report includes a section titled "Value not set", it contains entries with no value for the grouping option you selected.
Add Advanced Filters: You can further filter the report by charge type, cloud account, VM name (for private cloud), service name (for public cloud), resource ownership, and billing tags.
Unlike the basic Organization setting, the advanced filter Organization Name provides a "contains" operator. For example, if you have organizations named "Acme 1" and "Acme 2", filtering the report by "Organization Name contains Acme" ensures that the report contains data for both organizations. The advanced Organization Name filter does not take cost allocation into account.
If an organization name has been changed and you filter on the new organization name, billing data created prior to upgrading to Commander 7.5 won't be included in the report.
Each line of billing data is sorted into one of five Charge Types. Use Advanced Filters to remove these Charge Types from the Cloud Billing Report:
If you don't have permission on a cloud account, data pertaining to that cloud account won't be visible in the Cloud Billing report. If regions aren't selected on a cloud account, data pertaining to those regions won't be visible.
The Cloud Billing report displays one entry per service or cost category with the number showing the total usage and total cost over the specified reporting period. The summary table shows the sum of all the service costs per service type. The chart represents the top 10 most expensive service types. The remaining service types are grouped under the title “Others”.
Itemized costs are rounded to two decimal places. The exact total cost is calculated before rounding.
