Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5-15.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Business Service Manager
Metering and Chargeback
One of the key characteristics of a cloud is the ability to measure the usage of cloud resources and report or potentially
bill for the utilized services. While cloud and self-service access bring a lot of flexibility and agility, they also brings
some challenges.
As cloud users start sharing the cloud platform or infrastructure resources, you need to have accountability of
the usage; otherwise, resources will be overused by some, while others won't get resources when they are needed.
To mitigate this, enterprises need to measure the resource usage and optionally charge back to the tenants. Though an
IT organization may not actually charge its lines of business, usage reporting provides a transparent mechanism for
budgeting resources and optimizes the cloud platform on an ongoing basis.
Understanding Metering and Chargeback
EM12c offers a sophisticated and flexible Metering and Chargeback mechanism whereby you can define models based
on fixed cost, configuration (such as version, licenses), or utilization, or a combination of these (see Figure
5-16
). This
feature enables you to meter resources at various levels—for example, host/VM level, database, and middleware. It is
well integrated with LDAP so that you can traverse the organizational hierarchy and generate the consumption report
at various levels.
