Hello Community!

I was wondering about how people are populating the "IT Resource Tower Quantity" field in the "IT Resource Towers Master Data" set.  These counts support certain report components in the Cost Transparency application.

What are some ways that people are capturing this information and populating this into their respective applications?

It seems, in a perfect world, you may have a data source with these counts pre-populated, but I would really doubt that anyone has a single data source that can populate all of these counts.  In many cases, I see an opportunity to leverage other, existing source data inputs in your existing CT Application to be appended to the bottom of the IT Resource Towers Master Dataset.

You're correct in assuming that no single source would ever have this data, in some cases volumes can be done with SumIf and lookup logic but in general this is intended to be manually updated. The volumes at this level can generally be directional versus exact since it shouldn't affect Unit Rates too much, most customers I know update this only quarterly versus monthly.

@David Ahn, Along the lines Joe Mitchell is referencing, If you have implemented the Apps and Services module of Cost Transparency, there will be some operational data (Servers, Storage, etc) that you may be able to lookup to pull in IT Tower counts.

To walk a specific example through for Servers:

• In IT Resource Towers Master Data, in the column mapping dialog, modify the formula of IT Resource Tower Quantity to something like:
• =IF(IT Resource Tower Name="Compute",{Physical Server Master Data}:{Physical Server Count}[{OS}={IT Resource Sub-Tower Name}],Value)
• This syntax returns the count of physical servers per OS from Physical Server master data into the corresponding sub-tower into the IT Resource Towers Master Data

A couple of caveats to this approach:

• If you have not implemented the Apps and Services module, and only have the Foundation module of Cost Transparency, the server count data would not exist
• In the Apps and Services module, we will have some operational data from which to look up counts (Servers, Storage, etc), but do not have the same for other towers, such as Network, Data Center, End User, so these would still need to be populated manually
• Depending on data volumes, the lookup described might be intensive from a performance standpoint

Thanks, Mark!  This is really helpful!

For a recent delivery project, I enabled the customer to do the following to get their "Storage" counts by tier.

So, in their version of ATUM, they have the following IT Resource IDs

1. Storage - Tier 1
2. Storage - Tier 2
3. Storage - Tier 3

The customer chose to use TB as the standard unit of measure.  I realized that TB counts for "Total Space" at each tier level was already available from the existing data backing the "Storage Devices Master Data" dataset.  I took the backing data, created a transform, grouped down to the field that captured the "Tier" of storage, and subsequently appended that dataset to the bottom of the "IT Resource Towers Master Data" dataset.

By doing the above, I ensured that the exact amount of storage, by TB, being used to weight allocations to storage devices were actually populating the counts in the IT Resource Towers Unit Counts.  I don't expect you'll apply this method for EVERY sub-tower, but easily for the ones that matter the most, first.

David

This is very helpful as I have not found any "official" documentation for gathering unit data in this backing table for ITRT.  Thanks!!