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The pricing tab enables the Cloud Admin to assign costs to resources. The Cloud Admin creates Pricing Models and assigns them to Enterprises.
Screenshot of resource pricing for datacenter or public cloud region
The Pricing Model allows you to associate costs with compute, networking and storage resources. You can also define charging periods and standing charges. And you can associate costs with specific VM templates and hardware profiles through cost codes that are tracked by the Abiquo Accounting service.
Screenshot of Cost Code pricing. Administrators create cost codes in the Pricing view and assign them to the VM templates in the Apps library view.
Hosting providers may need to track the licenses used by Virtual Machines (e.g. Microsoft Windows licensing), or may wish to offer Cloud services based on a per VM pricing model.
- Create cost codes in the Pricing view and a pricing model and assign it to your enterprise.
- Configure a VM image in the Apps Library and open the Advanced tab
- From the drop down select the relevant Cost code for the VM
- This code can be used to track the VM in the Abiquo platform for licensing or charge back.
The pricing model also allows a charge-forward price to be shown to the cloud user to provide an indication of the potential cost when they deploy a new environment for the first time. The user can also request a pricing estimate for a group of virtual resources at any time, through the UI or the API.
Screenshot of pricing model creation with charge-forward price message in the box on the lower right-hand side.
Beyond the pricing model in the UI, Abiquo collects granular accounting data for all resources on the platform. See Abiquo Accounting Services Integration. You can easily export the accounting data using the Billing system. The billing integrations also gather the pricing information that corresponds to the resource usage information in the accounting system. See Abiquo Billing Integration.
The platform can import price lists from public cloud providers such as Amazon and Azure. And it can display public cloud billing information on the Hybrid tab of the Home view dashboard.