The following costs are displayed for services:
- Estimated cost: The estimated cost of a service is calculated on an annual basis by adding the storage costs, operating system costs, support costs, and custom attribute costs to the cost of the allocated or reserved resources for the service. To learn how to edit the costs that Commander uses in its calculations, see Configure Cost Models.
- Actual cost: Actual costs are taken directly from historical billing data. Actual costs include prepaid amounts, overages, promotions, and adjustments. For VMware and SCVMM, custom attribute costs of virtual machines are included in the Actual Costs section of the daily cost details. Business support and taxes are shown on the first day of the month and aren't calculated per VM. For information on how to retrieve billing data, see AWS Billing Data and Retrieve Azure Billing Data.
Actual costs aren't shown for GCP instances. GCP charges aggregated CPU and memory usage costs and are grouped by project and service type. GCP billing data doesn't include costs for individual VMs. For more information, see Retrieve GCP Billing Data.
View estimated and actual costs
Access: | Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications |
Available to: | Any level of Access Rights |
The cost of a service is displayed in the Details section of the service's Summary tab in your preferred currency. To change your currency preference, see Select your display currency.
By default, Estimated Annual Costs are shown, but you can also display the Actual Costs. For information on how to display the Actual Costs property in the Details section, see Display properties.
In the Details section, click the Details link next to Estimated Annual Costs or Actual Costs to open the Costs Details dialog.
Use the drop-down lists to select either Estimated Costs or Actual Costs and the time period.
The cost of a public Azure image is always displayed as 0. Azure costs don't include taxes.
Costs and the service catalog
Because deployment decisions (for example, target host or cluster and storage location) can affect the total cost of a service when it's deployed, the cost of a service in the Service Catalog may not match that displayed for the source service in the tree. The Estimated Cost displayed in the Details pane for a VM template includes only storage and custom attribute costs; it doesn't include CPU, memory or operating system costs. The cost displayed for that same template when added to the Service Catalog, however, includes all resource costs. The Service Catalog cost provides you with a more realistic view of what the template would cost when deployed as a VM.
For catalog item types Custom Components, Cloud Formation Templates, Amazon Marketplace AMIs, ARM Templates, OVA/OVF Templates, and GCP deployments, administrators can specify the input cost for the service in any currency. This cost will be converted to the user's preferred currency.
Also note that the Service Catalog costs displayed in Commander may not match those displayed in the Service Portal. In the Service Portal, service catalog costs are based on the provisioning destinations assigned to the user. If multiple destinations are assigned, or no destination is available, Commander displays the most reasonable cost estimate. If a Service Portal user chooses the destination on the request form, the displayed costs change accordingly.
If you've implemented the Cost Adjustments feature to apply markups and discounts to your costs, adjusted costs will be shown throughout the Service Portal.
See also: