Feature Overview

Being able to show information about costs is an important feature of cost management, because it gets cost management to be closer to the objective of being the application that shows you all the costs that can be associated to your services and then help the customer to distribute those costs into more meaningful items. One source of costs that can be quite high is the subscription or licensing costs (in some cases licensing can be several times higher than the costs of Infrastructure.

Goals

• Integrate HCS data in cost management
• Integrate Subscription Watch data into cost management (through HCS or standalone)
• Integrate Red Hat Marketplace usage and cost data into cost management (through HCS or standalone)
• Being able to associate a cost model to the SWatch information (subscription rating)
• Distribute costs so they can be seen in the interface

Requirements

• Create a new level of information (Subscriptions, along Infrastructure and Supplementary)
• Identify subscriptions attached and add their cost to the object (i.e. a node subscription used should be added to the cost of the node)
• Create new sources for Swatch and RHMarketplace data.
• Make monthly assignment of other costs (i.e. year subscription should be distributed into monthly charges). Ask SWatch whether the cost should be that of the subscription or the effective costs, show unused costs? (UX needed to define how to do that and toggle between real costs and distributed costs)
• Distribute costs into other elements as any other costs.
• Allow the customer define subscription/license in price lists

Subscription Watch does not provide a way of understanding the price paid the customer, so we need to find a way of getting this information:

• Find the price list and MSRP
• If possible, find the price applicable to the customer (the same way that AWS, Azure, etc provide that info)

Background

Red Hat is providing under IT Business management tools and applications that can be used to improve the way customers interact with the company. Two of the first applications that will provide value for the customer are cost management and subscription watch

For cost management, that means changing from managing the costs of OpenShift taking into account just the infrastructure and the services provided, to providing a holistic view of all the elements that create costs and are a responsibility of Red Hat.

It is important to take into account that this is not trying to extend the scope of cost management beyond Red Hat.

There are other tools in the market (like Apptio), that have a wider scope and are more suited for overall IT management. With this integration, what we want is to provide a full solution for all costs related to Red Hat, so we make it easier to work with Red Hat.

Why is this important

It is important that we can differentiate OpenShift and Red Hat using cost management. Financial visibility and forecasting are the top two problems when watching data in the cloud. And Subscriptions represent twice the cost that the infrastructure, meaning that being able to show subscription information and infrastructure together will multiply the value of cost management.