Creating consumer reports

Create consumer reports that show how much block capacity is used and the cost of the block capacity that is used by an application, department, hypervisor, or physical server.

Storage consumer reports help the managers and owners of applications, departments, hypervisors, and physical servers realize the cost of the block storage that they use, plan block storage usage more efficiently, and reduce block storage costs.

  1. Click Reports, and then click Create Report.
  2. In the Summary Reports pane, click Storage Consumer.
  3. Type the unique name of the report, and enter the delivery and the scheduling details.
  4. From the list, click the type of storage consumer and type or click the name of the storage consumer.
    To generate a report about the hypervisors or physical servers that belong to a cluster, you choose Hypervisor or Physical Server, and then choose or type the name of the cluster.
  5. Choose whether you want to calculate block capacity by allocated or assigned space.
  6. Choose the unit of capacity measurement that you want to use in the report.
    Tip: To make sure that the recipients of the report get the report that they want, check the report preview.
  7. Choose whether you want to use default or customized costs for block storage.
  8. Choose the types of storage that you want to include in the report.
    To change the default costs for block storage, click the lock (lock icon) icon.
  9. By default, the storage costs are shown in the report. To exclude storage costs from the report, choose one of the following options:
    Storage cost optionSteps
    Use Default Cost
    1. Click the lock (lock icon) icon.
    2. In the Include Storage Cost in Report section, click No.
    Note: If you exclude costs from a report that uses default costs, the costs are excluded from all of the chargeback and consumer reports that use default costs.
    Use Custom Cost In the Include Storage Cost in Report section, click No.
  10. Set the unit costs for the block storage that is used.
    To get a complete picture of the capacity and cost of the block storage, include the cost of the data that is copied.
  11. Click Save.
    If you set the frequency of the report to Now, you click Save and Send.
The report is saved and, depending on the scheduling option, the report is sent to the recipients or scheduled to be sent later. If you want to change the configuration of the report, click Reports, select the report, and then click Edit.
Tip: You want to send a scheduled report now, but you don't want to change the original schedule? Click Reports > Reports. Select the report, and click Actions > Run Now. The report is sent without changing the original schedule.
If you want to extract capacity information regularly about your storage resources, you can use the Representational State Transfer (REST) API to automatically export the data that you need to generate custom reports or share with external applications.