40 Chargeback for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Chargeback allows you to divide the cost of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) entities and charge internal customers based on their respective usage via an easy-to-use wizard.

You can choose Exadata Cloud Service and Exadata Cloud at Customer target type to initiate OCI Recharging flow to get a breakdown of charges for all supported member targets. Typically, customers are billed by allocation in OCI. Chargeback lets you divide the cost by usage and re-bill the application owners by usage as shown in the following breakdown example.

As shown in the illustration, you can perform Chargeback operations against single member targets. When working with large numbers of targets, it may be easier to use dynamic groups to simplify these operations. For more information about dynamic groups, see Overview of Dynamic Groups. in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator's Guide.

Prerequisites

Before you set up Chargeback for OCI, ensure the following conditions have been met:

• Chargeback must be enabled for Exadata Cloud Service amd Exadata Cloud at Customer member targets (DB Instance or PDB), as well as Database-as-a-Service and on-premises databases.
• If Chargeback operations are going to be performed against groups (instead of individual member targets), then Chargeback must be enabled for these groups. For more information about groups, see Managing Groups and Using Administration Groups in the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator's Guide.
• The daily data collection in Chargeback is an extract, transform, load (ETL) process where information is extracted from one source, transformed into an appropriate format and loaded into a repository. Chargeback data collection for the time period under consideration must have already happened for the targets.

Getting Started

Enterprise Manager Chargeback provides an easy-to-use wizard to simplify the Chargeback setup for OCI targets.

1. From the Enterprise menu, select Chargeback. The Chargeback homepage appears.
2. Click Cost Recharging. The Chargeback wizard appears.

Note:

You can also access the Cost Recharging button from the Chargeback Reports page.

Chargeback Templates

The Chargeback wizard simplifies the Chargeback setup for OCI targets, however, having to set up Chargeback for a large number of targets can be cumbersome. To simplify this task, you can save repetitive step input from a wizard session to a template. The saved template can then be loaded and input applied to future Chargeback target setup sessions.

If no templates have been created for the session, from any step of the wizard, you can select Save as Template from the Save drop-down menu. This lets you begin saving the session input to a template.

Once the template creation process has been initiated, clicking Save Template on subsequent steps saves any new input for that step to the template.

If templates have already been created, each time you begin a Chargeback wizard session, you will have the option creating a new template or selecting from a list of existing template.

To view the input saved to a specific template, select a template from the drop-down list and click View Template Details.

Adding Entities

On the Entity type/Entities page, you specify the entities you want as part of your Chargeback analysis.

1. Click +Add. The Select Entity Type dialog appears.
2. Left-click in the Select field to and select the one or more entity types you want to include as part of the Chargeback session.
3. Click OK. The selected entity types appear in the Select Entity Type table.
4. Select an entity type from the table and click Select Chargeable Entities. The Select Entities dialog appears.

   Note:

   You can select predefined Enterprise Manager Groups to simplify dealing with large numbers of targets. For more information about Groups, see Managing Groups and Using Administration Groups in the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator's Guide. For large numbers of entities, you can search by name or member entity type.
5. Select the desired entities from the Entity Name list and click Select. For Group entity types, a list of chargeable entities now appears in the Chargeable Entities column. For a each entity type, the number of selected entities displays. You can click on the chargeable entity in the table to display the list of the selected entities and remove entities if desired.

Changing Entity Configurations (Optional)

Once you’ve selected the chargeable entities, they will appear in the Configuration table where you can specify different charge rates for entities based on their configuration. By default, all entities will have the same rate. If desired, you can change entity configuration.

Note:

Changing the entity configuration is optional. You can skip this step if you are happy with the default configuration.

To change the charge configuration for an entity type:

1. Select an entity type from the table and click Set Up Configurations… The Select Configuration dialog appears.
   
   
   
   
2. Select the entity configuration attribute and click OK. The updated configuration attribute appears in the Configuration table for that entity type.
3. Click Next to define Costs Per Period.

Defining Cost Per Period

You now need to specify the costs, Chargeback period, and the recovery costs for your chargeable entities.

1. From the Cost Per Period wizard page, specify the Charge Period Start and End dates.

   Note:

   Ensure that data collection has already occurred for the specified time period.
2. Enter a value for the Recovery Cost. This can be obtained from the OCI Bill.
3. You now need to specify the cost breakdown per entity. Enter the percentage recovery cost breakdown by first double-clicking on the entity Recovery Cost (%) column entry field and then specifying a percentage value between 0 and 100. The total recovery cost must equal 100.

   Once you’ve entered the percentages, Chargeback will calculate the per entity Recovery Cost and Recovery Rate ($ per month per entity).

   Note:

   A dollar sign is used for the currency symbol by default. If desired, you can change the currency symbol by navigating to the Chargeback Home page. Click on the Settings tab at the lower left. Enter a new Currency Symbol and click Save.

   Changing the Currency Symbol only changes the symbol. No currency conversion is performed.

   
   
   
   
   
4. Click Next to define the Chargeback rates.

Specifying Chargeback Rates

Chargeback uses entity information that Enterprise Manager collects as a basis for calculating metering.

On the Rate Suggestions page, you define the rates to be charged per entity based on the collected metric data. Rate suggestions are calculated using the Change Period and Recovery Cost (both set on the Cost Per Period page). The Recovery Rate per month for each entity and Average Daily Usage values are also calculated using these values.

1. In the Rate Suggestions tree list, you will see entity configurations listed for each entity type. Click on an entity configuration to display the Recovery Rate and Average Daily Usage values for the configuration.
2. Enter the weighting percentage by first double-clicking the Weighting (%) column entry field for that configuration and then specifying a percentage value between 0 and 100 for that entity. Once a weighting percentage has been entered, the Chargeback calculates the Cost/Month and Suggested Rate.

   Figure 40-1 Graphic shows the Rate Suggestions page.

   

   Note:

   • Starting with Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.5c Release Update 10 an additional drop-down Unused Resource Assignment is available. It allows you to specify whether unused resource charge needs to be added to a Same Entity or an Associated Host Entity.
   • Starting with Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.5c Release Update 10 the additional Fixed item type has been added into Recovery Rate, it is shown directly under Universal. This item type shows the fixed costs involved in operating consumed resources such as power, real-estate and admin salary.
   • If no metric data has been collected during the Charge Period, you will not be allowed to specify a weighting percentage.
3. Repeat step 2 until all weighting percentages have been specified. Note: The total weighing percentages must equal 100%.
4. Click Next to view a report containing a comprehensive breakdown of charges.

Viewing the Chargeback Report

The final page of the Chargeback wizard displays a tabular report detailing a full breakdown of charges per entity.

Viewing the Report

The following is shown for each target:

• Cost Center: The cost center to which the entity belongs.
• Entity Name: The name of the entity.
• Entity Type: The entity type.
• Usage Charge: Total usage charge for the charge period.
• Adjustment: The adjustment charge compensates for times (any hour in a day) during a charge period when an entity is down or not uploading metric data for Chargeback to use in its calculations. The adjustment fills charging shortfalls created by the missing data The adjustment charge uses a proportionate cost split per entity that provides a percentage cost approximation.

  Example: Let’s say you have two entities that consist of 30% and 70% of the breakup of the cost respectively and one of the entities goes down for a day. Chargeback uses the 30% and 70% proportional split to approximate the charges. So, if there is a $100 gap between Total Recovery Cost and the Total Charge shown in the report, the adjustment charge would be added proportionally between the two entities.

• Total Charge: Total charge for the entity for the charge period.

Note:

Starting with Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.5c Release Update 10 an additional drop-down Unused Resource Assignment is available, if you select this the Reports page will display the unused charge.

• If the Same Entity option is selected for Unused Resource Assignment, the Unused Charge will be assigned to the entity.
• If the Associated Host Entity option is selected for Unused Resource Assignment, the Unused Charge will be assigned to the associated or underlying Host entity.

If the HOST entity is not selected in the Specifying Chargeback Rates, and Associated Host Entity is selected. The unused database resource charge will be displayed in the Reports page as an additional row.

If the Database and associated Host entity is selected in Specifying Chargeback Rates, the charge for unused database resource will be added to the unused Host resource and displayed.

Warning: A database and its associated or underlying host should not be part of same Cost Recharging flow. This can result in duplicate unused resource computations.

Updating the Report

To update the report, click Previous to go back and change any entity configuration/charge parameters.

Saving the Report

To save the report, you can export the report data to a comma separated value file. To do so, click Report and select Save as CSV.

Saving the Session as a Template

To save the Chargeback session input for future use with other targets, you can save the session as a template. To do so, click Save Template and select Save or Save as Template.

Ending the Chargeback Session

To end the Chargeback wizard session, click Finish.