Billing And Cost Management In Oracle

Cloud (OCI)
Nowadays, It is critical for organizations to keep track of Billing and Cost
Management of various services(Compute, Database, Storage, Networking, IAM) in
OCI.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides Cost Analysis, Budgets, and Usage

Reports through which you can analyze your spendings on different services, keep
track of services used, and set a threshold on your spending.

a suite of tools Oracle provides to help us understand spending patterns, monitor

consumption, analyze their bill, and, ultimately, reduce spending.

Pricing Models
Oracle offers several pricing models to help you maximize the potential from cloud
services while optimizing the cost at the same time.

1. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG): Allows you to quickly provision services with no

commitment, and pay only for what you use.
2. Universal Credits-Monthly Flex: Select a monthly prepaid commitment and
can consume any IaaS and PaaS cloud service anytime, anywhere.
3. Bring your own license: Bring your current on-premise Oracle software
licenses to equivalent, highly automated Oracle IaaS & PaaS services in the
cloud.
Benefits of Cost Management

Oracle Cost Management provides various enterprise-grade controls to maintain

control over cloud cost:

1. Predictability: Budgets ensure predictable cloud spending and prevent over

usages.
2. Control: Quotas help you centrally control usage of high-value cloud
resources
3. Visibility: Cost Analysis Dashboard help maintain visibility over the spending.
Usage reports also help gain insight into resource-level visibility.
4. Optimization: Ability to perform cost optimization and lower spend.
5. Extensibility: Lets you leverage cloud management and BI tools you already
know and use.

Pre-requisites
 User must have access to an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy
 To use registry service, the user is either a part of the admin group or part of a
group to which a policy grants the appropriate permissions

Steps To Configure

OCI Cost Analysis

Cost Analysis is a visualization tool that helps understand spending patterns at a
glance. To use this tool, user must be a member of the Administrators group. Cost
Analysis filters cost by Date, Tags, and Compartments.

Use the Cost Analysis dashboard to view your spending by service or by

department, compartment, or cost tracking tag.

1) In Start Date, select a date. In End Date, select a date (within six months of the
start date). Click Apply Filters

2) From Tag Key, select a tag. Click Apply Filters

3) From Compartment, select a compartment. Click Apply Filters

OCI Budgets
The budget is used to track actual spending for the whole tenancy or per
compartment. It is also used to set alerts on your budgets at predefined thresholds to
get notified.

The following concepts are essential for budgets:

 Budget: A monthly threshold you define for your cloud spending.

 Alert: Email alerts that get sent out for your budget

1) Navigate to Budgets in OCI Console and click on Create Budget

2) Sample Budget Alert Emails

OCI Usage Reports

A usage report is a comma-separate value (CSV) file contains detailed information
about your OCI resources consumption. It is generated daily and stored in an object
storage bucket.

It can be used in conjunction with your rate card for:

  Invoice reconciliation
 Custom reporting
 Cross-charging
 Cost optimization
 Resource inventory

Sample Dashboard from a Usage Report

Service Limits and Usage

When you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a set of service limits are
configured for your tenancy. The service limit is the quota or allowance limit on a
resource. Your tenancy’s limits, quotas, and usage can be seen in the Console.
Service limits can be increased from within the Console after submitting a request.
Compartment Quotas
Quotas give you better control over how resources are consumed by letting you
allocate resources to projects or departments. Compartments help you restrict usage
to a small set of resources, restrict resource counts or disable services as
necessary. Similar to Service Limits; but service limits are set by Oracle, and
compartment quotas are set by administrators.
Oracle Cloud Workload Cost Estimator
Oracle launched Oracle Cloud Workload Estimator last month which shows a
drastic difference between the computing scenarios of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
and AWS.

This tool offers an apples-to-apples comparison of key workloads between Oracle

Cloud infrastructure and that of AWS. You will be amazed to see the results that
show “Oracle is a more cost-efficient option for many high-performance
applications.”
Cost Management Best Practices
Let’s take a look at some best practices for cost management:

 Create a budget that matches your commitment amount and an alert at 100
percent of the forecast. This gives you an early warning if your spending
increases and you’re at risk of getting an overage.
 Use compartments for cost management along with access-control. Many
customers set up one compartment per department for cost management and
cross-charging.
 Use cost-tracking tags (like cost-center) to allocate costs in more granular
ways.
 Enable monitoring of all resources. Monitoring data can be merged with cost
data to gain powerful insights on how to improve resource utilization.
 Usage reports are also used to analyze costs and drive custom solutions.