Cut Costs with Quest® Foglight® Evolve’s Cost Director

Hello. Welcome. My name is Luke Vinton. I am a sales engineer here at data protection with Quest. And today, we're going to be talking about Cost Director. So what Cost Director is divides up into two basic pieces, on premise, so the amount of cost consumption for on premise servers, and then cloud cost. And cloud cost is if you are monitoring machines that are already up in Azure or AWS, we talk to them, we talk to your subscription, we pull in that pricing data, and we do some advanced modeling with it, and kind of help you figure out cost for the future. But first, what I want to talk about is the one I mentioned first, the on premise cost. So when you first install Foglight, in order to take advantage of the Cost Director, you first have to fill out a questionnaire. And when a customer first installs Foglight, they'll actually get this green banner across the top. Cost Director initial setup is incomplete. Click here to complete the setup. And I've already gone into Cost Director. Keep in mind this is a VMware feature only as of right now. We do not have Cost Director for Hyper-V. But what it is is you would click on Cost Director. It brings up this screen. And it allows you to walk through a questionnaire where you talk about, or you answer questions about the specs of the environment. How much did you pay per month for the CPU? You have to look at the price of the server. So the customer will need to have some data in order to fill this out. How much are you paying per year? Things like that. They will have to do some calculation. But it comes down to first, figure out the cost of the server, the CPU, RAM, and disk space of the server, and then break down that cost. So you'll go through, you'll fill out these numbers, we also have a basic pre-populated plan. And then you kind of divide up the virtual machines into different business units or whatever is significant to that customer. And then after you've done so, you would hit Finish, and then we'll jump over to another installation. And that's what we've looked at we can kind of see here. The overview of the on premise cost, the consumption, and again, the customer isn't paying per month for these things. But it is very nice because they can know the depreciation. I'm technically a VM that uses more CPU and disk space. It's costing you more from the amount of CPU, and RAM, and disk space that it's using. And we assigned a dollar amount to that. And obviously, we can change the currency as well. But I can see that the 10 most expensive virtual machines in the last 30 days. And again, because you can divide up the VMs you're looking at into different business units, sales, accounting, whatever. It really helps you say, oh, development, they're using a lot of resources. So technically, they're costing us the most the compared to the other business units. So you can divide it up that way. You can also look at your top virtual machines. So this is, again, based off the consumption of resources of these machines. And this data is really nice, because again, we automatically populate it. You don't have to manually calculate it or anything like that. You do it once during the initial questionnaire and then we can take care of it from that point on. And this pricing data is really important. And the reason that we have that little banner at the top when you first install Foglight is this data really infiltrates all parts of Foglight. It shows up in the optimizer because it can tell you how much cost savings you can get if you resize a VM from 4 gigabytes of RAM down to 2. It also pops up in the cloud modeling feature where you want to know the on premise cost of a virtual machine because you're trying to figure out the cloud cost. And if you have on premise cost and the cloud cost right next to each other, it can make the decision of whether or not to migrate that machine into the cloud really easy to decide. So we really recommend that VMware customers, they fill out the cost director because it can give them a lot of insight into their environment. It can help them figure out what VMs are, if you're using those resources, so therefore costing them the most. Is it wise to migrate into the cloud? For what particular VMs? And again, like I said, the data that shows up in the other parts of Foglight. So I hope that's been helpful. Thank you for your time. And we'll see you in the next video.