7.1 Understanding Chargeback

The PlateSpin Recon flexible chargeback reporting capabilities allow organizations to accurately calculate IT costs based on actual and virtualized resource usage. IT departments can then allocate their costs to different business units and departments.

Even when resources are part of a virtualized pool of computing resources shared across many workloads, PlateSpin Recon not only allows you to track, assign, and report on used resources, but it can also generate reports and deliver them to the appropriate business units.

To set up a chargeback system:

  1. Create raters to assign appropriate charges for usage.

    For more information on how to create a rater, see Section 7.3.1, Creating a Rater

  2. Attach the raters to particular machines to be tracked.

    For more information on how to attach raters to machines, see Section 7.3.4, Attaching Raters to Machines

  3. Generate Chargeback reports.

    For more information on how to generate a Chargeback report, see Section 5.5, Generating Reports.

NOTE:It is useful to organize machines using Chargeback into their own group. For more information, see Section 3.4, Working with Groups.