Analyzing IT Asset Management and SaaS Spend
Managing and optimizing spend is a vital responsibility of the IT Asset Management and Financial Operations (FinOps) teams. These teams collaborate to allocate and distribute spend to various departments such as business units, cost centers, and corporate units within an organization. The allocation of spend helps them to understand and make informed decisions about the organization's technology and cloud spend. The FinOps team can also allocate the software spend by various dimensions, such as manager, location, business unit, cost center, and so on. The convergence of IT Asset Management and FinOps teams enables organizations to manage their cloud software and reduce financial waste.
IT Asset Management and Software as a Service (SaaS) spend data is available in Cloud Cost Optimization and enables you to analyze the total IT spend for software, hardware, SaaS, and cloud. Using the default dimensions, you can analyze the spend in the cloud dashboards ( Dashboards > Cloud ) and Tabular View ( Cloud > Cost Optimization > Tabular View ). You can also use the tag dimensions and rule-based dimensions to create custom dimensions to analyze the spend unique to your cost center and line of business. Your organization can gain a comprehensive view of their overall IT spending, including both on-premises and cloud-related costs.
To analyze the IT Asset Management and SaaS spend data, you can use the following field mappings to understand which Cloud Cost Optimization dimensions, metrics, and resource tags to use within the tabular view and dashboards.
Mapping Flexera IT Asset Management Fields to Cloud Cost Optimization Dimensions
The following table lists the IT Asset Management fields and indicates which fields map to which Cloud Cost Optimization dimensions:
| Cloud Cost Optimization Dimension | IT Asset Management Field | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Vendor | N/A | Flexera ITAM |
| Service | Product | Office |
| Resource Type | SKU | ms-ea-trueup-year2 |
| Region | Location | Itasca, USA |
| Category | AssetType | Other |
| Manufacture Name | Manufacturer or PublisherID | Microsoft |
| Spend Type | SpendType | Software |
| Usage Type | Name or ItemDescription | Desktop Office Pro with SA |
| Resource Group | PurchaseOrderNo | Random text |
| Flexera Capability | N/A | fnms |
| Invoice ID | ContractNo | Random text |
Mapping Flexera IT Asset Management Fields to Cloud Cost Optimization Metrics
The following table lists the metrics that you can use to analyze the cost and usage of the IT Asset Management spend in the tabular view and cloud dashboards:
| Cloud Cost Optimization Metric | IT Asset Management Field |
|---|---|
| Cost | TotalPrice |
| Usage Amount | EffectiveQuantity |
Mapping Flexera IT Asset Management Fields to Cloud Cost Optimization Resource Tags
The following table lists the resource tags that you can use to create custom dimensions. You can also use the tag dimensions and rule-based dimensions to allocate the IT Asset Management spend unique to your cost center and line of business. For more information, see Tag Dimensions and Using Rule-Based Dimensions to Analyze Cost.
| Cloud Cost Optimization Resource Tags | IT Asset Management Field |
|---|---|
| CostCenter | CostCenter |
| CorporateUnit | CorporateUnit |
Mapping Flexera SaaS Management Fields to Cloud Cost Optimization Dimensions
The following table lists the SaaS Management fields and indicates which fields map to which Cloud Cost Optimization dimensions:
| Cloud Cost Optimization Dimension | SaaS Management Field | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Vendor | N/A | Flexera SaaS Management |
| Service | ProductName | Salesforce |
| Resource Type | SKU | Power_BI_Standard |
| Category | CategoryGroupName | Analytic Tools |
| Manufacture Name | VendorName | Microsoft |
| Spend Type | SpendType | saas |
| Usage Type | Category | Productivity |
| Resource Group | LicenseAgreementName | Microsoft Office 365 |
| Flexera Capability | N/A | fsm |
| Usage Unit | LicenseTermType | PerUser, PerOrg |
Mapping Flexera SaaS Management Fields to Cloud Cost Optimization Metrics
The following table lists the metrics that you can use to analyze the cost and usage of the SaaS Management spend in the tabular view and cloud dashboards:
| Cloud Cost Optimization Metric | SaaS Management Field |
|---|---|
| Cost | LicenseTermPayment |
| Usage Amount | ItemsAllowed |