A few months ago I wrote about a cost model I was working on for our Internet Data Center that ties together costs and complete environment usage. We finished the model and applied it to our January 2004 operating costs. We learned a ton about what we don’t have in place to effectively implement such a model. We generated more than 5MB of reports and data to support this usage based mode, including storage utilization reports, switch and router port utilization reports, staff time reports, and bandwidth usage reports. We must find a way to automate most of this; otherwise I am going to kill myself each month doing this manually. What we found we were missing was a ton of bandwidth monitors for internal traffic. This is no small task given three interfaces per host. We are looking at
Orion from SolarWinds to help us with this.
