IBM Apptio

IBM Apptio

A place for Apptio product users to learn, connect, share and grow together.

 View Only

How do you get Storage costs to Applications and Network costs Data to Servers?

By Apptio Community Member posted Fri April 16, 2021 03:21 PM

  
Our Storage and Network data in our CMDB is confusing to state it lightly.  How/Where are you getting your Storage and Network data for Cost Transparency?  We currently don't have a path in our CMDB to link Storage and Network costs to Application.  How is your CMDB configured to get allocation data for Storage and Network spend to the Application?

Are you able to get all your Storage and Network data from your CMDB?  Do you have to use data from Storage providers to get the data you need?  If so which software and reports are you using.

Really need help with this one!

Thank You
#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)
3 comments
2 views

Permalink

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/apptio-community-member/2021/04/16/how-do-you-get-storage-costs-to-applications-and-network-costs-data-to-servers

Comments

Guillermo Cuadrado
Fri April 30, 2021 08:46 AM

We get from the CMDB the list of storage and network devices. We then map the financials to the device categories (firewalls, the various storage types, etc.) For storage, we have some allocation data. Those costs we ship either to servers or to applications, depending on the data source.
The network costs go to all servers, except a short list of devices that go to a few dedicated applications.
To minimize large ARTs (relationship tables between objects) we go through the Data Center object, which goes to all servers based on the location.
I'll see if I can write something more comprehensive in the coming days. Not our strongest suite, I have to say.
#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)

Jenny Franklin
Tue April 20, 2021 12:09 PM

I'm not much help on this one as we use NetApp and our Storage team adds the app code to the data.  What I did at my last job was like what Keith did, though, by checking for server/storage volume matches.  For network, you could see what infrastructure is in a each data center or colo and send a percentage of network to those.
#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)

Apptio Community Member
Mon April 19, 2021 11:55 AM

Hey Michelle,

We use NetApp and PureStorage for our storage. I'm using our servers as the primary resource for application tagging. Then, we have data pulls directly from NetApp and PureStorage that identify the servers that are using the storage. This isn't always simple, because multiple servers can access different types of storage, rather than a 1-to-1 relationship when you carve out space for a single server. In those cases, I've reached out to the departments that are using the volumes with multiple servers and asked them to tell me what application the volume ultimately supports. I enter this into a "Storage-to-App" table. Once I have that data, I apply the application tagging by first checking to see if there is a 1-to-1 server relationship for the volume. If so, I grab the application tag from the server and apply it to the storage (I do the same thing for ownership and billing info). If I find no 1-to-1 server relationship, then I use the storage-to-app table to get the application tag.

I use this method for server backups as well. I go to the server being backed up and grab its application tag (and ownership/billing info). This can be repeated for anything that's related to a server (performance monitoring, hosting fees, datacenter costs, etc).

Hope this helps. Ping me separately if you'd like to jump on a conf call and walk through how this works in our environment.

Thanks,

Keith
#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)