Tip Tuesday: Delivering business visibility with Abiquo Reports

Abiquo’s award-winning user interface provides a simple, intuitive interface for both end users and systems administrators to manage virtualized cloud environments. However when you need to deliver business information to the people who need it, Abiquo Reports can be an ideal platform.

The recent release of Abiquo Reports contains a number of new reports that specifically aim to visualise key business metrics that help understand how your users are utilizing the Abiquo environment. For example, the new System Activity report delivers a wealth of summary information to help make business decisions and to target business activity, by identifying:

• Growth information on the number of Users, Enterprises, Virtual Datacenters, Virtual Applications and Virtual Machines

• Charts and heat maps to help visualize when the system is being used.

• Identification of of the top growing and shrinking Enterprises by various metrics (by user count , VM count, and by activity)

User Audit Report

Additionally, the new Infrastructure Growth report uses Abiquo’s detailed accounting data to encapsulate key system level trending and growth information of the key resources, and can be used to easily summarize and visualize system growth within a single page, easy-to-read report.

Datacentre Planning report

Abiquo Reports uses Jaspsersoft,the most flexible, cost effective and widely deployed Business Intelligence suite in the world, enabling better decision making through highly interactive, web-based reports, dashboards and analysis. Leveraging a commercial open source business model, Jaspersoft provides end-to-end BI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of other vendors. Visit www.jaspersoft.com to learn more.

The use of Jaspersoft allows for automated scheduling of reports in multiple formats, and provides a framework for customer that wish to develop their own reports.

Visit our Wiki for more information on Abiquo Reports with Jaspersoft

Tip Tuesday: Accounting and billing customizations for all!

Abiquo supports two basic charging models for cloud resources:

• Allocation – where customers are allocated a pool of cloud resources (vCPU,vRAM,storage etc.) and are charged for those resources regardless of whether they are consumed or not

• Consumption – where customers are charged for the resources they have actually consumed, typically on an hourly basis.

However, the needs of Abiquo customers are often more complex with discounts, commitment, burst and many other models coming into effect and in order to meet those customer needs, and to also deliver flexible accounting and billing solutions Abiquo have developed a billing plugin integration.

This allows Abiquo’s rich set of raw data (allocation, and consumption) to be imported to an easy to read CSV file, or directly to a billing solution such as Aria, Zuora, Ubersmith or CloudCruiser. Billing data can be aggregated in a number of different ways by Abiquo in order to support a variety of different tennant models.

As well as standard resources such as vRam, vCPU, and Storage, Abiquo can also provide accounting data for other services that may incur additional costs on the cloud platform. Functionality such as reserved hardware, high availability can all be metered, along with additional resources such as specific template images or hypervisors.

The billing integration also supports custom connectors. Allowing data from third party sources (e.g. networking bandwidth) to also be tracked and aggregated with other usage data that will form the final bill.

Click here to learn more about the Abiquo billing integration or click here to find out more about Accounting in Abiquo.