Costs dashboard
The Costs dashboard is an interactive, analytical tool that provides actionable insight into the costs of your organization and budgetary units. The Costs dashboard is particularly useful for the Information Technology Financial Controller (ITFC), Chief Information Officer (CIO), and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) user roles. You can view all of your assets at a global level or view a smaller set of assets by selecting them from lists. To select the assets from lists, you apply local filters on the graphs and the table within this dashboard.
Before you begin working with this dashboard, ensure that you have reviewed the section about filtering in Navigating the user interface.
Key features of using the Costs dashboard include the following:
- Analyze cost variance and budget compliance.
- Determine which assets and services are the primary items contributing to costs.
- Discover the optimal path to containing and cutting costs.
- Identify what is driving your spending and costs.
- Determine the primary user or order producer.
- View current and projected costs.
- Obtain insights on usage and identify ways to use resources more efficiently and more cost-effectively.
- View bills and detailed information about costs in the Invoice Line Items table.
The Costs dashboard consists of the following components:
- Cost vs Budget graph
- Cost/Budgetary Unit and Cost/Category data and donut chart
- Cost/Billing Account line graph
- Invoice Line Items table
Reporting
Reporting is available on the Costs dashboard. From this dashboard, IBM® Cloud Cost and Asset Management (ICCAM) users can gain full visibility into Cloud and IT spending. The extractable and reusable format can be used for executive reporting and to share with others without access to the ICCAM dashboards. Reports continue to be generated even when all users have logged out of ICCAM, and are available when users are logged in again. An audit log entry is created each time a report is run.
Managing reports
To run a report, complete the following steps:
- Click Manage Reports near the upper-left corner of the screen. The Manage Reports window displays.
- Click one of the following links to select the report type:
- Favorite Tags report: This report is provided in .xlsx format. Only the first 100 tag values are considered for analysis.
- AWS Reserved Instances Insight report: This report is provided in .csv format.
- Chargeback report: This report is provided in .csv format and includes a converted user-defined currency.
Continue with these steps by choosing a report from the three that follow.
Favorite Tags report (xlsx)
Using the Favorite Tags report gives you the choice to receive email notification when the report is finished generating. The report is set by default to email you. If you do not wish to receive an email notification when your report is ready, click to clear the box.
Click Generate report. A message briefly displays on the screen indicating that report generation is in progress, and report status is displayed beside the Manage Reports link. Alternatively, click Cancel to close the window without running a report. When the report has finished generating, a status message displays beneath the Manage Reports link.
To view the report, click Manage Reports again and click Download last report beside the last report run. The last report that each logged in user generated remains available for viewing and saving for that viewer.
Note: If report generation fails, the failure is reported in the audit log entry, and ICCAM attempts to run the report again. Reports might fail due to using the Utilization or Other Filters global filters as they are not supported sources for this report. To proceed, remove them and generate the report. In the event this occurs, you can click Remove & Generate in the Report Error window to remove the filters and regenerate the report, or you can click Cancel and adjust your filters.
AWS Reserved Instances Insight report
Click Generate report. A message briefly displays on the screen indicating the report status. Alternatively, click Cancel to close the window without running a report. To view the report, double-click the downloaded report in the lower-left corner of the screen.
Note: If report generation fails, the failure is reported in the audit log entry, and ICCAM attempts to run the report again. Reports might fail due to using the Utilization or Other Filters global filters as they are not supported sources for this report. To proceed, remove them and generate the report. In the event this occurs, you can click Remove & Generate in the Report Error window to remove the filters and regenerate the report, or you can click Cancel and adjust your filters.
Chargeback report
When you select the Chargeback report, the Manage Reports window displays your options.
- You can click **Download last report** to view the last Chargeback report you ran.
- You can click the down-arrow to select a currency to convert to and enter an exchange rate in the corresponding text box.
- You can click **See all reports** to return to the previous Manage Reports window.
- You can click **Cancel** to close the Manage Reports window without generating or viewing a report.
Click Generate Report. A message briefly displays on the screen indicating that report generation is in progress. When report generating is complete, the .csv report is available for viewing in the lower-left corner of the screen. Double-click the report to open it.
Note: IBM Cloud supports PaaS accounts under BlueMix. If you want to generate the PaaS Report, you must enter a PaaS API key into an IBM Cloud asset account credential screen.