#Chargeback reporting

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

shadow beacon
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I am interested in using Harvest as part of a chargeback reporting solution to allocate costs associated with storage services to individual business units or departments. I would like to know if you are aware of anyone who has used Harvest for this purpose or if you have any advice or best practices for setting up Harvest to support chargeback reporting.

Are there any known limitations or caveats to using Harvest for chargeback reporting, such as data accuracy or performance issues?
Can Harvest be configured to collect data on storage resource usage at a granular level, such as by application or department?

sour notch
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@shadow beacon Harvest collects performance, capacity and hardware metrics from ONTAP via ZAPI/Rest. I am not sure if ONTAP stores chargeback information.

mossy lion
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@shadow beacon I've personally not seen this done with Harvest specifically, but I've seen people push data from AIQUM or ONTAP itself into a billing tool for chargeback use - so it is probably somehow feasible w/ Harvest too. Either way the main challenge typically seems to be one of three things, so it can help to give thought to these in advance:

  1. how do I easily marry up my asset data with my line-of-business consumer data?
  2. how do I avoid double-counting when multiple entities consume a shared resource?
  3. how do I ensure that there aren't assets I'm failing to charge for - where is my data incomplete?

I'm not sure if it is an option in your case, but I think you'll find Cloud Insights is well suited to this type of requirement. It has built-in organizational metadata options (think assigning applications, departments, organizations, lines of business, etc.), including cost summarization by tier and service-level.

shadow beacon
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Thanks for getting back to me on this. I'm actually dealing with a bit of a unique situation here with a large and complex dark site, so Cloud Insights is not going to work for us unfortunately. AIQUM is good, but it's limited to ONTAP, and we need to include StorageGRID in our chargeback reporting.

Do you have any updates on this issue? https://github.com/NetApp/harvest/issues/209

I was hoping to use Harvest as a kind of aggregation point to produce a basic report that we could then feed into our billing system. Is that something that's feasible with Harvest, or do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks so much for your help, and let me know if you have any other insights or ideas.

sour notch
shadow beacon
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Thanks for this.

With regards to StorageGRID my current plan is to:

Poll the StorageGRID REST interface
Parse the data returned from the API and write it into a DB likely Prometheus
Customise the reporting from Prometheus
Figure out the logic based on ILM policies to get capacity figures
Export as CSV --> Billing tool

Again, I envisioned Harvest as an aggregation point for all data. In my scenario, we have more than one GRID in the environment. If Harvest collects Capacity metrics, I can poll Harvest or better yet, generate the report from it.