Cloud Expense Management

Commander’s cloud cost management capabilities provide cost visibility and cloud cost comparisons.

Commander tracks virtual asset costs in real time and provides effective IT chargeback or showback that you can act on. It also provides built-in cost calculation and simple-to-use wizard-based cost models that you can customize for both public and private infrastructure.

Comprehensive reporting on virtual infrastructure costs and growth trends provides you with valuable information for budgetary planning and service placement decisions. And because Commander also supports multi-tenant cost configuration, you can present well-defined costs for different users, customers, or parts of your infrastructure.

Commander interfaces with third-party platforms for billing, service management, and asset management. Working with your existing billing system to invoice customers, the Commander API makes it easy to access VM billing records.

Get started with cloud expense management

After you have performed the essential steps to get started with Commander, you can begin to use Commander to manage your cloud account expenses. For more information, see Getting Started with Commander.

The basic steps required to begin managing cloud expenses with Commander are:

Configure Cost Models
Configure private cloud cost models and enhance the default public cloud cost models used for showback and chargeback. For more information, see Cost Models.
Check Recommendations
Review and apply rightsizing, power schedule, and reserved instance recommendations to optimize performance and reduce costs. For more information, see Manage Recommendations.
Run the Cloud Billing Report
Calculate the accrued costs to date for all private and public cloud services. For more information, see Cloud Billing Report.
Run the Reserved Instance (RI) reports for AWS or Azure
Achieve greater savings by optimizing the use of RIs. For more information, see the following reports:
Run the Azure Software Licensing Report
View your Windows OS and Azure SQL Server databases' usage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which can optimize your license cost savings. For more information, see Azure Software Licensing Report.
Go to the Cost Analytics Dashboard
View in-depth and customizable costing details on your infrastructure. For more information, see Cost Analytics.

Additional chargeback and IT costing topics

The following topics are related to chargeback and IT costing and may affect the costs that you want to manage:

Service Costs
Cost Configuration
Calculate Custom Costs
Organization quotas and costs
- Set Organization Quotas
- Shared Cost Allocation

Reports

You can use the following reports to better realize chargeback and IT costs: