For a US-based service provider, a modern and more granular approach to metering tenant workloads was essential. Pay-per-use, calculated at an hourly rate for CPU, memory, and network, is crucial for today's cloud offerings. Additionally, the integration of value-added and special services, such as bandwidth, third-party security services, and service levels, must be considered.
For years, this service provider has operated a stable VMware Cloud Director platform, supporting IaaS services with highly customized solutions and over 100 third-party services (e.g., burstable internet speeds, fiber cross-connects, backup services, etc.).
The current solution for billing these services is managed through self-created scripts that run on a scheduled basis. Although these scripts function well, they are difficult to maintain and customize, and they cannot meter specific services on an hourly rate. For example, service providers should be charged an hourly vCPU rate as soon as the VM is powered on.
The implementation of VMware Chargeback was carried out using comdivision's well-established methodology. During a workshop, a billing design was developed. Together with the technology experts from the provider and the control and accounting teams, various billing options were discussed.
After finalizing the decisions, the integration of VMware Chargeback was completed, and the complete design was configured into the product. Thanks to the features of this new solution, it is easy for the provider's customers to not only view billing information through the Cloud Director interface, but also to receive detailed data on current load in the form of metrics, dashboards, and alerts. Based on their expertise and a testing phase, the way billing information is extracted and used by the finance department was further refined.
Over time, more than 100 additional services have been integrated into the tenant app via the API, providing a single billing solution. Adding new items to a bill simply requires the service provider to add the appropriate metadata to the Cloud Director object.
Following the deployment, comdivision delivered additional services to customize reporting and consult the service provider on technical and functional issues related to the Tenant App.
