Streamline Financial Reporting with Storage Chargeback & Showback

Chargeback and showback are reporting methods that identify and assign the usage and costs of resources to the department or user group that used the resources. While showback reports simply show this information, chargeback is used by financial departments to deduct those costs from department budgets.

In IT storage, for example, chargeback and showback reports would track how much storage each department (or business unit) consumes – and how much that usage cost the organization. Read our guide to learn more.

In enterprise environments, assigning and tracking storage usage (and costs) is not necessarily a simple process.

You have to decide how to group departments and how to assign costs. Do you charge based on how much storage was actually used, or just allocated? Will you charge differently for different tiers? How about ancillary costs like the energy, cooling, and maintenance required for the devices?

Then you have to avoid duplicate or missed charges and rely on perfectly accurate data collections.

Read more about these and other challenges.

Visual One Intelligence® automates data collection, business unit reporting, and forecasting. Reporting can be customized to utilize customer naming standards (if they exist). If not, Visual One Intelligence® can make a list of all hosts, VM, volumes, LUNs, etc. to assign rules and costs for each device, after which analysis becomes automatic (you can always update or add assignments in the future).

Essentially, Visual One uses an automatic two-step data collection process to collect:

Data from your infrastructure devices
Data used for your business unit assignments (naming standards, provisioning
systems, etc.)

Once the data is collected, automatic analysis is performed on the devices and all resources (hosts, VMs, volumes, etc.) for which business units are collected. Duplicate storage assignments are eliminated, and full reports are generated including chargeback charts, showback models by device and business unit, and forecasting models.

See for yourself on one of our live demos!

Yes! With a standard subscription you have full, 24/7 data collection and reporting – including all of our business unit and chargeback & showback visibility and insights. Plus, you can try us out free for 30 days.