Billing Charge Back Report

About Example

Table of Contents

About this Report

When to use this Report

What this Report Contains

How to Generate the Report

Scheduling and Saving a Report

Customizations That You Can Perform With This Report

Set the Report to Generate Using Uncompressed Application Size

Additional Reports

Billing Detail Report

About this Report

The Billing Charge Back report displays a summary of the charges/cost associated with the primary and secondary storage entities for the CommCells in the CommNet domain over a specified period of time.

When to use this Report

Use this report to determine the price for protecting the data of a department in your company.

What this Report Contains

This report presents the data in the following sections:

Sections Sub-Sections Description
Summary for all Selected CommCells Cost Categories Aggregate The table displays the cost category for each of the selected Cells along with the following information:
  • Total price for the cost category.
  • Ranking based on how expensive the cost category is compared to others.
  • Price to store data on the associated storage entity.
Cells Aggregate The table displays the selected Cells along with the following information:
  • Cell type
  • Total price for the cell.
  • Ranking based on how expensive the cell is compared to others.
  • Number of backup operations performed and the price involved for each operation.
  • Total data size.
Clients Aggregate The table displays all the clients for the selected CommCells along with the following information:
  • Cell type (primary or secondary storage)
  • Total price for the client.
  • Ranking based on how expensive the client is compared to others.
  • Number of backup operations performed and the price involved for each operation.
  • Total data size.
CommCell Cost Categories Aggregate The table displays the cost category for the clients in a CommCell along with the following information:
  • Total price for the cost category.
  • Ranking based on how expensive the cost category is compared to others.
  • Price to store data on the associated storage entity.
  Cost categories associated with a SRM Exchange subclient calculates the data size information from the Exchange mailboxes and public folders. Transaction logs are not considered in the calculations.
Cell Information The table displays the following information for the clients and their entities in a CommCell (including information about subclients for secondary storage and volumes for primary storage):
  • Total price for the client/agent/backupset/subclient.
  • Ranking based on how expensive the client entity is compared to others.
  • Number of backup operations performed and the price involved for each operation.
  • Total data size.
 
  • The Price for Storage value represents the actual cost and it is calculated using the actual storage data size.
  • For Virtual Server Agent jobs that were suspended or resumed, the actual storage data size will reflect a larger value in the Data Size column, causing the Price for Storage value to show a higher cost of storage than the actually used.

How to Generate the Report

1.
  • From the CommNet Browser, click Reports.
  • Under Billing Reports, click Charge Back Report.
2. Click Generate.

Scheduling and Saving a Report

After a report is generated, you can schedule a new report and save it to an specific location as a PDF, excel spreadsheet or MHTML file. Scheduling and saving reports will help you analyze and compare data from your CommCells.

Follow the steps below to create a schedule:

  • Click Schedule from the top of the report window.
  • Type the name of the schedule and enter a description.
  • Click Next.
  • Select the appropriate schedule options. For example:
    • Select the time zone.
    • Select the start date and the frequency to generate the report.
    • Change the Start Time to 9:00 PM
    • Click Repeat Task and configure at which interval the schedule should be repeated.
  • Click Next.
  • Select the file format.
  • Click Save To File to save the report to a local drive or network share.

    Specify the Destination Path for the output file.

  • You can also click Send E-Mail to User(s) and/or User Groups(s) to send the report as an email attachment to a user or user group.
  • Click Finish.

The report will be generated as specified in the schedule task.

Customizations That You Can Perform With This Report

You can further customize the report by using the filters available in the report. To access the filter options, click Filters at the top of the report window as shown in the image. After making your selections, click Generate to update the report.

The following table describes the available filter options.

Filter Description
Time Range Selection You can adjust the reporting period as follows:
  • Specify the number of days.
  • Display the billing charge coverage between a specified time.
Price Selection By default, the report calculates the cost based on the price for primary and secondary storage resources (Category Costing option). This price is also based on drive type storage resources. You can calculate the category cost based on media type storage resources by clicking Media Type.

You can also calculate the cost based on a fixed storage price by clicking Fixed Costing.
Override Configured Price By default, if you are using the Fixed Costing option to calculate the charges, the fixed price for storage resources are based on the parameters defined in the Price Per Data Protection and Price Per MB/GB/TB/PB of Data settings of the Cell Configuration dialog box in the CommNet Browser.

You can temporarily set a new price for these parameters by selecting the Override Configured Price option.
Configuration Selection By default, the report displays the cost information based on the clients from all CommCells in the CommNet domain. You can refine your cell selection removing the CommCells or Cell-Client Groups that you do not want to include in the report.

You can also generate the report based on billable entities by clicking Billable Entity Based. From the Available pane, select the billable entities you want to include in the report and click Add.
Primary Storage Information By default, the report includes information on primary storage entities. You can choose to exclude this information by clearing this option. However, if you exclude this information, you will not be able to include information on uninstalled clients or pruned/aged operations.

Consider the following when this option is selected:

  • The charges associated with primary storage resource for SRM components are based on the time range specified on the local time of the CommNet Server.
  • For the SRM Windows File System, the agent must be first installed before cost categories can be assigned to primary storage resources.
  • When cost categories for an Oracle agent are assigned, the SRM Agent must be installed on the Oracle server.
  • For the SRM Unix File System Agent, it is recommended to assign the cost categories to logical volumes in the CommCell Console and not to disks.
  • For an SRM Exchange client, this report will be based on the configured subclients for primary storage resources.
Secondary Storage Information By default, the report includes information on secondary storage entities. You can choose to exclude this information by clearing this option.

Consider the following when this option is selected:

  • All copies used for backup operations will be charged. If a backup operation residing on a primary copy is copied to a secondary copy, the protected data will be counted twice. For inline auxiliary copies, the number of backup operations will be counted once although storage price will be counted twice. If the copies use different cost categories, backup operations will be charged according to the cost category associated with the storage resource used by each copy.
  • Synthetic full operations are charged.
  • The following are not counted in the report:
    • Incomplete, killed, or failed operations
    • Express Recovery Backups
    • SnapVault operations
    • Replication Pairs assigned to billable entities
  • If a subclient is deleted, the cost of protecting the data will still be calculated for the subclient.
  • For single instance disk libraries, the cost will be calculated based on the total job data size, even if a single instance hardware does not write all of the job data to the disk. For example, if you perform a backup operation of 100 GB and only 10 GB of data is written by the hardware, the software will calculate a charge back amount on the entire 100 GB.
Include Uninstalled Clients By default, the report includes information on uninstalled clients. You can choose to exclude this information by clearing this option.
Include Pruned/Aged Operations By default, the report includes information on pruned/aged backup operations. You can choose to exclude this information by clearing this option.
Consider Deduplication saving By default, the cost calculations are based on the size of the application data that was backed up (application size). If you want the cost calculations to be based on the size of the data stored on the media after deduplication (media size), select this option.

Set the Report to Generate Using Uncompressed Application Size

You can use the CNComputeCostUsingUncompressedSize Qscript to force the Billing Charge Back Report to generate using the uncompressed application size. For more information about this Qscript, see Command Line Interface - QScripts.

To enable uncompressed application size with the Qscript:

  1. Open a command prompt.
  2. Enter qoperation execscript -dbn QNet -sn QS_CNComputeCostUsingUncompressedSize [-si 1].

Additional Reports

The following report is not considered a primary report as it derives from the Billing Charge Back report.

Billing Detail Report

This report provides a detailed view of the cost for all the backup operations that occurred during a specific time range. You can access this report for a particular cell or client by clicking an active grid from any of the tables in the main report.

You can customize this report by changing the default tree view of the listed jobs to a Table View.