There are many reasons for delivering chargeback reports in Citrix XenApp environments.
- Requirement to bill business units for Citrix usage to complete monthly internal chargebacks for Citrix total cost of ownership.
- Citrix Services Program, their new SaaS plan, requires a chargeback report for monthly licensing costs.
- CFO or other executives require a usage report by department to understand internal usage trends for better license forecasting and growth planning.
XTS Introspect provides the capabilities to produce simple or more complex chargeback reports with the following features.
Ability to bill by groups
- Full integration with Active Directory out of the box. This allows reporting by department, business unit, etc.
- Build custom groups based on servers, applications, processes or even custom user groups.
Integrated billing equations
- Create custom equations that produce billing amounts based on any metric captured in a custom report field. The most popular metric is concurrent users due to the direct relationship to Citrix licensing costs. Others include unique users, sessions, duration (by month, day, hour, or minute), total CPU, etc.
Advanced filtering for complex chargeback criteria
- Create Boolean expressions so that chargeback report only pulls metrics based on specific criteria. For example, only charge by weekday usage. Or only charge if a target metric exceeds a threshold.
Scheduling, Distribution and exports to XML, Excel, PDF or HTML
- Set it and forget it capability to easily schedule reports to run daily, monthly, etc. Report output can be delivered in multiple formats, either through automated emails or by saving to shared folders or portals, like SharePoint.
Multiple farm chargebacks
- Some customers have more complex situations, which Introspect handles through automation and formatted output options. One Fortune 1000 XTS customer has multiple farms and must chargeback by peak usage per Active Directory group, but the AD group usage spans multiple farms. To overcome this challenge, they set up one report for each farms to run on a monthly schedule. The output is automatically exported to XML. They wrote a script to take the output and combine it, taking the peak usage day of the month for each AD group and putting the results into a final custom report output.
To learn more about XTS Introspect features, click here. For more information please email info@xtsinc.com or call 888-243-4492 X1.