The Services report gives the ability to report on your metered based IT consumption costs from a Services perspective. The way you've defined your Service Catalogue, determines the Services and Service Categories you'll see here.
Once you've logged into the system, go to "Reports" > 'Services'. From here you will get a view across all consumed services. There are different types of filters and selections you can choose from.
Once you have selected your date range and Report Definition, you can start viewing your data. By default it will show all consumed services for this Report Definition, and only for the accounts you have access to. If you want to limit your view, you can change the Report Definition reporting 'Depth', and then apply additional filters such as:
Category - to only view certain Service Categories
Account - to limit your view to all services belonging to a certain account
When filtering the services for a specific account, it is recommended to start your journey at the Accounts Report from where you can drill down into a specific account, and then select the associated services using the buttons in the detailed report:
The Accounts report gives the ability to drill down into your metered based IT consumption costs. The way you've defined your Report Definition, determines on what values you can zoom into.
Once you've logged into the system, go to "Reports" > 'Accounts'. Here are a few key parameters you can choose from that define how your report is generated:
The date selector is important to limit the scope of data you're focusing.
First select the date you are interested in. This can be a single month, a 3-month time period, half a year, a full year, or a custom date range.
You Exivity solution can have more then one Report Definitions configured. If this is the case, you will need to select the appropriate Report Definition that contains the data on which you want to report. Keep in mind that an end user will only see Report Definitions that he or see is allowed to see, and the first one is automatically selected.
Once you have selected your date range and Report Definition, you can start drilling down into your data using a number of ways:
You can move your mouse over one of the accounts that are shown in the detailed report. For each account, you have the ability to 'Drill Down'. This will do two things:
Changes your Report Definition view one level deeper
It sets the 'Parent' filter to the account you've selected
Apart from the ability to 'Drill Down', you can also view the 'Services' associated with an account on any level of your Report Definition. This will change your view from the 'Accounts' report to the 'Services' report
The graphical user interface of Exivity is a pure client-side application, which means it runs inside your web browser. It communicates with the Exivity REST-API to obtain data records, report data and general configuration. This means all functionality available in the GUI can also be accessed programmatically.
The interface allows you to do the following:
Develop extractors
Create transformer (ETL) tasks
Configure report definitions
Run graphical usage & costs reports
Run textual usage & costs reports
Manage users & roles
General configuration
White labeling
More features are added on a regular basis.
Report Definitions play a key part in Exivity. A report definition determines which column(s) in the normalised data created by Transcript during the step should be used to group the charges.
Once a report definition has been created, it is necessary to prepare the day(s) that the report is required to be run against.
Once a report has been prepared for any given day (or range of days) it is not necessary to repeat the preparation process unless a rate has been updated, or the Transform step has been re-run for any days in the range of dates for which the report was previously prepared.
Once data has been processed by Transcript and loaded into the system, one or more report definitions are created in order to 'slice and dice' the data however you wish. The columns specified in the report definition will determine the chargeable entities (referred to as accounts).
The report preparation process will update the accounts list in Exivity such that reports can be subsequently executed against those accounts.
A report definition is hierarchical in that the first column is termed level 1 and each subsequent column increases the level by 1. For example a hierarchy of Reseller, Customer, Resource Group will group the charges by those columns.
Reports can be executed against any of these levels. Using the example above, a report run at level 1 will show the total charge leveraged against each unique Reseller, a report run at level 2 will show the charges associated with each unique combination of Reseller and Customer and so on.
Before you can create a Report Definition, you will need to understand what data you have loaded into the system. Specifically, it is important to understand on which columns you want to report. Once you have that worked out, you can create a Report Definition as follows:
Go to 'Reports' > 'Definitions'
Then click 'Add Definition'
In the new window on the right side of the screen, provide a meaningful name for your report. Keep in mind that this name will also be displayed to your customers / end users that will have access to (parts of) this Report Definition
Now you can select up to 5 level deep your reporting columns. Typically these should relate to "Departments", "Business Units" etc in Enterprise organizations. Or "Customers", "Resellers" etc in Service Provider use cases.
Once you've selected all columns that make up this Report Definition, click "Insert" to create it.
Once you've created a Report Definition, it is required to prepare it. The preparation of a report populates the accounts table, and also optimizes the performance when running your reports.
To prepare your Report Definition, follow these steps:
Go to 'Reports' > 'Definitions'
Then click the Report Definition name that you want to prepare
The list on the right shows the number of Days that have consumption Data available. When the Integrity for a single day is shown as Unknown, it means that particular day(s) requires preparation. When creating a new Report Definition, this needs to be initiated manually for the entire date range as shown in the above example.
Click the 'Prepare Report' button
It might take a few seconds up to several minutes before the preparation of your Report Definition has completed. This depends on the amount of Consolidated Usage Records, and the amount days you'll have to prepare your report for. While the preparation of your report is running in the background, you may continue to use the system. However, until the preparation of the report has completed, running a report might yield partially complete data.
The Summary report provides a detailed cost report that can be used as a invoice detail specification. The way you've defined your Service Catalogue, determines what you'll see here.
Once you've logged into the system, go to "Reports" > 'Summary'. From here you're able to generate different kinds of detailed costs reports, which can be used for billing, charge back and show back.
Once you have selected your date range and Report Definition, you can start viewing your summary cost report. By default it will show all consumed services for this Report Definition, grouped account, considering the selected 'Depth'. Therefore it is important that you select an appropriate 'Depth' when running this report.
The Summary report has a few reporting options that you can turn on and off. These options allow you to create more or less detailed textual representations of your data:
If you want to include a detailed grouping of Services and Service Categories, then you'll need to have the Services checkbox enabled. The same goes for including Instance level information. The latter enables you to view resource level consumption data, such as the Virtual Machine, Containter or User Name.
