Chargeback in Oracle Enterprise manager 13C

Since Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C it is possible to allocate the costs of IT resources to the people of organizations who consume them. This is done through the use of the plugin ‘Consolidation Planning and Chargeback’ .

Pete Sharman wrote an excellent blog about configuring  this plugin in Enterprise Manager 12c, and it’s not my intention to copy his work, so I’d like to focus on complementary stuff regarding Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c.

In this article a short note about how simple it is to install the plugin in OEM13c and of course some important new features within the plugin

Be aware that by using this plugin you need the Cloud Management Pack – license!

Oracle Enterprise Manager is using plugins nowadays for a lot of functionality and I’m very pleased with it. One downside however that in some cases there’s downtime involved of the Oracle Management Server. And unfortunately in the case of this plugin it is the same. The OMS will be restarted.

Installing the Consolidation Planning and Chargeback Plugin

Choose Setup –> Extensibility –> Plugin

choose the Oracle Consolidation Planning and Chargeback

 

Right click, ‘deploy on management server’ .

Deployment page:

Next, Review (Downtime required !!! ) and : deploying, stopping and starting oms

 

 

And the plugin Oracle Consolidation Planning and chargeback should be visible.

 

What about the new features, is it useful?

There are indeed some very useful enhancements. Especially the ‘Estimate button’ and modifying the rates of a past period comes in very handy.

 

Estimate button

The hardest part of configuring chargeplans is to determine the rates of an entity. The sample charge plan which is included in the OEM13c installation, consists of only one entity: ‘Oracle VM guest’.

But there’s hope. When a rate has been chosen, it’s possible to run an ‘estimate’ how much a target will cost per month.

 

 

Example of an estimate, in this case two hosts / instances in the Oracle Cloud, compared with the Universal Charge Plan.

One of the charge plans at the database instances is completely out of reality I think .

 

 

 

Plan Advisor

 

Next to the ‘Estimate button’ there’s a ‘Plan Advisor’ button, a guided process which will end up with suggestions about the rate.

 

In this guided process you will have to fill out the following elements:

– Estimation of the recovery costs of a specific period (default 48 months) . In this case chose randomly for 10.000 Euro.

– the weighting of the different metrics.

 

Be aware: when clicking ‘save’ this will be saved as a new plan with the added entity.

Interesting part is the suggested rate. You might want to use this for creating a plan manually.

 

 

 

Editing existing plans

What happens when you find out you had a wrong guess with the rates. It is not unthinkable. I configured a chargeback-plan (EM12C) a while ago at a customer site (they had licenses!) as a test.

The report looked after two months like this:

 

 

Apparently I charged too much for storage……

I can’t change this in EM12C for that particular period, but in EM13C I can. You will get a warning that when changing charge rates for the current cycle that the changes are retroactive to the beginning of the cycle.

 

Tiered pricing:

 

Another new feature is the ‘tiered pricing’. This enables users to specify pricing with different rates depending on how resources are consumed. Quote : “Tiered Pricing also enables peak/off peak rates to encourage users to consume IT resources at times when resources are used less. This feature enables administrators to drive resource usage towards times when resources have less use”.

When planning to use peak times within tiered pricing, define this in the home page of charge back, in the <settings> page:

 

 

<Edit> Peak times, e.g. peak times for monday to friday from 8am – 5pm.

 

 

And when adding an item at setting rates , you are able to define the ‘Rate Formula Type’ as ‘Tiered’ and the ‘Peak/Off-Peak’.

 

 

 

In my opinion functions like the ‘Estimate’ button and ‘Plan advisory’ are very useful. But try to keep it simple. Chargeplans based on different processor, peaks, and using different tiers will become very complicated and not transparant to the customer.

 

Sources:

Documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E63000_01/EMCLO/chargeback_cloud_admin.htm#EMCLO907

Blog Pete Sharman: http://petewhodidnottweet.com/2014/10/setting-up-chargeback-in-em-12-1-0-4/ 

New features according to the doc: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E63000_01/EMCON/whats_new.htm#EMCON706