While the Data Centers component does not provide any new reports in Cost Transparency, it is used to provide better visibility into the cost of your applications. It is also a prerequisite used by the Data Center Optimization component (which is part of the Business Insights application).

Common source systems

You may not have a list of data centers readily available from a source system. In many cases, customers create a list in Excel. If you have many data centers, you can use the location information in your Servers and Storage data to gather a list of possible data centers.

Questions to consider

As you begin researching your Service Desk data, here are some questions to consider:

• Is the data center intended to be a data center or is it a room in an existing building used as a server room?
• Can you associate your physical hardware to a data center location?
• Are there other functions for which the data center is used (such as space shared with other IT but non-data center groups)?
• Do you have contacts in mind for requesting the required data?
• Do you anticipate any struggles with acquiring the data?
• How clean is your data?

Required columns

The table below lists the data sets and specific data elements from those data sets that are required. There are many other data elements you may wish to include. Please refer to your Configuration Workbook for more details on all data elements.

Data Center Identifier

The identifier for the Data Centers object is the Data Center ID.

Columns Required to Link Data Sets

You will also need to consider the ways in which you'll link the Tickets Master Data to other data sets. The table below highlights some specific data elements needed for linking data sets together.

If you do not have sufficient data for allocating between Data Centers and Physical Servers, you may use assumptive allocations. For Data Centers to Physical Servers, this means you should allocate costs evenly across all servers.