ChargeView: An integrated tool for implementing chargeback in IT systems

Most organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on IT product and services to manage their daily operations. The total cost of ownership (TCO), which includes the hardware and software purchase cost, management cost, etc., has significantly increased and forms one of the major portions of the total expenditure of the company. CIOs have been struggling to justify the increased costs and at the same time fulfill the IT needs of their organizations. For businesses to be successful, these costs need to be carefully accounted and attributed to specific processes or user groups/departments responsible for the consumption of IT resources. This process is called IT chargeback and although desirable, is hard to implement because of the increased consolidation of IT resources via technologies like virtualization. Current IT chargeback methods are either too complex or too adhoc, and often a times lead to unnecessary tensions between IT and business departments and fail to achieve the goal for which chargeback was implemented. This paper presents a new tool called ChargeView that automates the process of IT costing and chargeback. First, it provides a flexible hierarchical framework that encapsulates the cost of IT operations at different level of granularity. Second, it provides an easy way to account for different kind of hardware and management costs. Third, it permits implementation of multiple chargeback policies that fit the organization goals and establishes relationship between the cost and the usage by different users and departments within an organization. Finally, its advanced analytics functions can keep track of usage and cost trends, measure unused resources and aid in determining service pricing. We discuss the prototype implementation of ChargeView and show how it has been used for managing complex systems and storage networks.