Using Cost and Usage Management

SAP BTP consumption models were explained to you earlier in this training. Here's a recap of what the models means and how they are related to the costs.

SAP BTP offers two different commercial models:

• Consumption based
• Subscription based

Consumption based

You get access to all current and future services that are eligible for this model. You have complete flexibility to turn services on and off and to switch between services as your business requires throughout the duration of your contract. This commercial model is available in the following flavors: 

BTPEA/CPEA

BTPEA/CPEA are also so called commit-to-consume models, where you do an upfront commitment (a prepaid investment in cloud credits for the contract duration, with an annual commitment to consume SAP BTP Services). You can top your cloud credits at any time. However, any overages are billed at list price.

Pay-As-You-Go

Pay-As-You-Go is a highly flexible zero-commit model: You pay nothing upfront and there's no minimum usage requirements or annual commitment. You pay only for the used SAP BTP services.

Subscription based

You subscribe only to the services that you plan to use. You can then use these services at a fixed cost, irrespective of consumption. Service subscription might be user metric or a resource metric (for example, SAP Build Workzone service, which can be based on number of site visits or user metric). You can increase your initial order if the resource/user usage exceed the subscribed quota.

We distinguish the following service types:

Non-elastic

Non-elastic services are charged as fixed monthly price. For example, with the Redis for SAP BTP, you have a fixed price for memory (which is on 4 GB blocks) per instance and month. If you need an instance with 6 GB, then you have to pay for two blocks of 4 GB.

Semi-elastic

In this case, we have a service that has a fixed price per month with included metrics quota, but for some of the metrics you can buy additional quota. For example, SAP Integration Suite, when you buy it, in the monthly price you have the tenant cost plus included message bundles. You can buy additional messages month for months, based on your needs (block only). Depending on the number of blocks you want to buy in addition, the price may vary.

Elastic

Those are services where the price is on finer granularity. For example, ABAP environment runtime (in 16 GB blocks) is billed per hour. The cost will be calculated based on the hours the configured instance is up and running. Similar for the ML service - billed per node/hour - the cost depends on the uptime of the nodes.

Due to the market situation, over the last years our customers are getting more sensitive regarding costs. The feedback we hear is that controlling costs is challenging in general, but even more with cloud services, especially when using consumption-based models like CPEA (or BTPEA)

To help the customers with the cost management with the SAP BTP cockpit we address the following three business flows:

• Usage monitoring: Continuously monitor the usage and resource consumption of services, viewing trends, and drill down in subaccounts.
• Cost Control (Cross Charge): Easily track and manage cost in an account hierarchy through search and filter options based on labels.
• Billing verification: Verify billing accurately, using data and terminology incorporated from your monthly balance statement.

To support those flows and the different business needs of the customers, we offer one central flexible UI (SAP BTP cockpit) – Cost and Usage. You can do an analysis from different perspectives (for example, in the account hierarchy view) and drill down into the details. It allows you to bookmark filters and queries for quick access, future reference, or sharing. There are many improvements that you can benefit from, and in the following information, we'll go over them.

In addition, for the customer who does the analytics using their own tools, we provide data as an XLS download or access it via APIs.

Let's have a look at the Cost and Usage UI.

It's divided into three main sections:

• Global Account and Contract Information
• Filter and Search
• Billing/Usage view, including the service cost trend over the past 12 months

Now we have a detailed view in each part.

Global Account and Contract Information: The view contains two side-by-side view cards:

• Global Account Info (left): Displays general info about your global account.
• Contract Info (right): CPEA or BTP EA. Provides information related to your cloud credit usage and cost per month, relative to your total cloud credits for the current contract phase. It also shows your monthly trend of the cloud credit usage and costs.
• You can switch the view between Cost and Usage using the switch on the top right or Expand to see more information.

Pay attention that if your global account uses a combination of the consumption-based commercial model and the subscription-based commercial model, the card on the right shows billing and usage data that is charged solely according to the consumption-based commercial model. In other words, for services that are part of your subscription-based commercial agreement, the billing and usage data in this card applies only to consumption that exceeds your prepaid (subscription) quota. For this excess service usage, you're charged according to your contract for the consumption-based commercial model.

For example, if your subscription contract is entitled to consume a given service at a fixed cost for up to 100 unique site visits, and 151 unique site visits are registered, this card shows data relating only to the 51 visits that have exceeded the prepaid 100 visits.

Filter and Search: Below the Global account and Contract view is the filter and search area. Here you can set the searches and filters: service, subaccounts/directories, or billing month. The filters and searches are applied to both Billing and Usage views below.

Search option: You can start typing, and the search offers results that apply to service names, plan names, subaccount names, directory names, labels assigned to subaccounts and directories, product IDs (SKU), and metrics. The search offers suggestions only for items that are currently listed.

Services or Subaccount/Directories: You can apply the same pattern. Start typing, or select from the list.

Time period: You can choose between the current month or any other within the last 12 months.

Once you have the desired information displayed, you can use the Bookmarks option to copy the URL of the displayed view and the currently set filters. You can then save this URL as a bookmark in your browser, or you can share it with a colleague so that they can quickly open the same view and filter settings.

Billing and Usage view: This section has two main views represented by tabs:

• Billing view: Shows the monthly billable service charges in your global account based on the aggregation of your resource's actual usage. The aggregation of all your subaccounts is calculated according to the pricing structure and legally billable metric of each service
• Usage view: Shows the data representing your actual non-aggregated monthly usage for services consumed in your subaccounts withing your global account. The view applies for both consumption-based and subscription-based commercial models.

Taking a closer look at the Billing view.

Billing View gives you two more perspectives, View by Service and View by Account:

 View by service: View all the services costs according to those selected in the Filter and Search filed billing month. You can drill down to see the costs per directory or subaccount and see the trend over the past 12 months by selecting the desired view.

To drill down and display more details about a particular service, select an entry in the table or its View Details button. When you drill down, a new pane opens and you can see, for example, exactly which subaccounts consume the selected service and the subtotal of charges and usage per directory and subaccount.

If the display is cluttered by too many service plans or account entities that have no charged usage, you can choose the Show only services with charged usage checkbox to hide them.

To view the monthly trend of a specific service plan over the last 12 months, select the plan in the main table, and then scroll down past the main table until you reach a chart. Choose the chart type in the View By dropdown list.

View by Account: This perspective provides an overview of your charged usage across different subaccounts and directories within your account hierarchy. It's useful for verifying cross charges within your company or organization.

To drill down and display more details about a particular subaccount or directory, select an entry in the table (or View Details button > at the end of the row). When you drill down, a new pane opens and you can see, for example, exactly which plans are consumed by the selected subaccount or directory and the subtotal of the charges and usage per plan.

If your account hierarchy includes directories, you can hide them and display your subaccounts as a flat list by choosing the Show only subaccounts checkbox.

You can quickly expand or collapse the entire account hierarchy by selecting the Expand All and Collapse All buttons.

To filter the main table for specific services, use the Services dropdown list.

To view the monthly trend of a specific subaccount or directory over the last 12 months, select the subaccount or directory in the main table, and then scroll down past the main table until you reach a chart. Choose the chart type in the View By dropdown list.

When you haven't selected a row in the main table, the Global Account Cost Summary chart is displayed below the main table. It shows a summary of the costs by month in your global account over the last 12 months. To get back to this chart when a chart with the costs for a specific subaccount, directory, or service is displayed, deselect the selected row in the main table.

If your global account has subaccounts that have been deleted but have charges in the last 12 months while they were still active, they'll still be listed. Such subaccounts are marked with (deleted) after their name. If these subaccounts were originally located under a directory, you'll see them listed directly under the root global account.

If your global accounts uses both a subscription-based and a commercial-based model, the Usage column shows the combined total usage of services, both subscription-based and consumption-based. Note that:

• The subscription-based consumption includes usage of services that falls within the prepaid quota that is specified in your subscription-based commercial model agreement. This part of the combined usage is shown in the Prepaid Quota column. There'll be no additional billing for consumption of the services that falls within this prepaid quota.
• The consumption-based usage includes the usage of services that exceeds the prepaid subscription-based quota. This part of the combined usage is shown in the Charged Usage column. For this usage, you'll be charged based on the terms outlined in your consumption-based commercial model agreement.

Switching to the Usage View: You can use it to display, monitor, and analyze the distribution of the raw (actual) monthly usage metrics for services consumed by the subaccounts in your global account over the past 12 months.

Th Usage view displays the data prior to aggregation for billing and can contain metrics that will no be aggregated since they are free or belongs to free services. Therefore, you can notice some discrepancies when comparing the data in the Usage view to the overall data shown in the Billing view.

Please pay attention to the following:

• If your global account uses only a consumption-based commercial model, such as SAP BTP Enterprise Agreement (SAP BTPEA), Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA), and Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP, this view includes all usage data, including non-rated services, such as free service plans.
• If your global account uses both the consumption-based and subscription-based commercial models, this view combines all usage data, which falls under your consumption-based plans, prepaid subscription quota, and non-rated data sets, such as free service plans. You can see the distribution of charged and prepaid usage and costs in the Billing view.

You can have all usage raw data exported to XLS if you prefer to handle it by yourself (that is, with a third-party tool).

The Export button is on the top right of the Cost and Usage view (above the Global account and contractual info). By the dropdown menu, you can choose the period of the data to export, or you customize it.

Like the balance statement, the leading column is Product (represented by Its SKU).

Note: You can sort the list in the UI Ascending or Descending.

Charged usage – as the name suggest – is the consumption-based usage. For the subscription accounts, it's always 0 (zero). For the Hybrid accounts, it's only the usage above the prepaid quota.

List Price column shows the cost for consumption-based usage.

Last but not least, the Entitlements pages have been improved incorporating new commercial information and additional capabilities. This increases the transparency and improve your understanding of entitlements, allowing you to take cost-cutting measures, where needed.

The entitlement section has two main pages:

• Service Assignments: View all services and quota assignments.
• Entity Assignments: View services by Directories/Subaccounts and a dialog for configuring/adding Service Plans.

At the Service Assignment page, you can view all the services and quota assignment. By using the "show commercial info" switch a new column, Entitlement Source, appears which gives you additional entitlement source information about how each of the entitled plans was added to your global account, for example, via a subscription to a product or bundle, a consumption model, or free services. This is important, because the same service plans may already exist, coming from different sources.

The second major improvement is the ability to see the commercial type of the plan. Is it Free Tier, Always free, or Consumption.

Another enhancement is the quick view of the total number of directories and subaccounts, where the service plan is assigned and you have the ability to drill down to see more details.

The next improvement is the access to service-related links by selecting the (i) button on the right side of the service technical name.

Added are link to documentation, and where available, links to discover center, commercial information.

Filter and search capabilities were improved as well. You can search for a service plan or entitlement source if you want to search by commercial type (that is, Free, Always Free, CPEA).