The CFO asks a simple question: what does it cost us to run the HR system? The CIO knows what the organization pays for cloud, licenses, the data center and OpenShift. But how much of that belongs to this one service is not clear. What follows is a week in spreadsheets and a result everyone quietly treats as a guess.
Without service-level costs, decisions get harder. You cannot fairly compare running something in your own data center with running it in the cloud. You cannot defend a budget or explain why a service costs more than last year. And IT teams end up suspected of not managing costs, even though they check every invoice.
Why spreadsheets fall short
We often see the same routine. Costs from different sources are pulled into a spreadsheet, each in its own format and often in a different currency. They are then split manually using an allocation key someone designed years ago and nobody fully remembers. The result holds only until the infrastructure changes.
The underlying problem is that costs and operational reality live apart. An invoice knows an account, a subscription or a project. It does not know which virtual server belongs to which application, or which application supports which business service. That knowledge lives in the CMDB. Unless the two are connected, every service cost calculation is a reconstruction.
Costs belong to components, not invoices
A reliable approach has three steps:
- One format. Bring costs from clouds, the container platform and the data center into a common structure so they can be added up and compared.
- One currency. Convert foreign currencies consistently and traceably, not at whatever rate someone happened to use.
- One link. Attach each cost to a specific infrastructure component and let the dependency map carry it up to the service.
Once costs are tied to CMDB items, the cost structure mirrors the operational structure. When infrastructure changes, the cost breakdown follows, without anyone rewriting allocation keys.
How Eywo Stratum handles it
Eywo Stratum imports costs in the FOCUS standard. It covers cloud providers, OpenShift and data center costs, so data from different sources arrives in the same shape. Foreign currencies are converted at the Czech National Bank rate, a method finance teams know and can verify.
Costs are linked to CMDB items: virtual servers, containers, storage, databases and more. Because the CMDB knows the relationships across layers, from business service through applications and databases down to servers, hypervisors and storage, costs can be shown per business service. The same data also gives you views by customer and by project.
Pivot tables inside the platform support the analysis. Anyone who needs detail can break down a service’s cost by platform, customer or period without exporting and reassembling the data.
The result is a number with a pedigree. For every cost you can see where it came from, what it is linked to and how it rolled up into the service total. The conversation with finance moves from “where did this number come from” to “what do we do about it.”
A number you can stand behind
Knowing the cost of a service does not require a perfect model. It requires a model that is connected to how operations actually run and that you can explain. Start with the services leadership asks about most, then add more. Each one gets easier, because the CMDB and the cost import are already in place. And the CFO’s next question will not cost you a week in spreadsheets.
FOCUS cost import and costs per business service are included in the Enterprise edition.
Eywo Stratum Enterprise
For shared-service providers and large organisations.