Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Billing Report

Every successful person knows that time is a precious commodity that once lost, cannot be recovered. Bearing this in mind, our biggest motivation for developing the OCI Billing Report was to enable our Cloud Engineer team to access information on dozens of customers’ cloud billing information, as well as budgets, configuration recommendations and their security scores, all from a single platform.

To achieve this, we developed a Native REST API application in Java using the Spring Boot framework. The REST API takes required information from the user which is then used by the program to call the Oracle REST API for the appropriate Tenancy. This native application is deployed on the Kubernetes Engine in the DSP-Explorer internal tenancy, which is configured to include a load balancer and enables us to scale the application as our needs change. Using this application, we are able to collate the information from as many customers as is needed into a Power BI report which is refreshed frequently to ensure the dashboard is up to date.

Unlike before, when the Cloud Engineers needed to log into different customer accounts to view their individual cost spent, they can now access it all on one platform. This saves the users time immensely. The summary dashboard below is colour coded to indicate how likely a customer is to exceed their monthly budget, this is achieved by making use of Oracle’s forecasting tool, enabling the user to prioritise which customer accounts to focus on.

Clicking on any customer’s card will take us through to a detailed report of their cumulative monthly expenditure and how close they are to their budget.

A new feature that I’ve been working on is adding recommendations information to the report. The report contains all of our CSP customers as of now, with room to add many more. The cloud expenditure as of now is in the millions.

The motivations for the development of the report, discussed above, were to aim for higher scalability and greater visibility of our customer's cloud accounts, enabling quick action to be taken when unexpected bills show up. Above all, we aim to improve the efficiency with which we can manage our customer’s cloud expenditure, saving the engineers time, and maximising our ability to care for our customers.

If you are interested in our Oracle Cloud Services, please contact one of our expert Oracle Cloud Consultants today. Alternatively, email us at enquiries@dsp.co.uk.