Invoices

Morpheus offers highly-granular costing data through invoices. Invoice views are highly customizable, allowing for nearly unlimited combinations of output columns and filtering. Invoices are based on monthly periods and allow you to slice costs in a highly granular way, as well as predict final monthly costs before the end of the period. As with other Morpheus UI pages that support advanced table customization, these views can be saved to provide easy access to costing views specific to varying business needs. By default, the invoice list page will show the last three months’ invoices across all clouds and invoice types but the list can be modified to target differing time periods or resource groupings. Read on in this section to discover the meaning of various invoice types and how this tool can be used to create targeted costing views.

Invoices for Public vs On-Prem Clouds

Morpheus supports live cost syncing for many public clouds, including all of the most commonly-used public clouds like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. For these clouds, costing sync is enabled through the COSTING field on the Add/Edit Cloud modal (Infrastructure > Clouds > selected Cloud > EDIT button). When live costs are synced from public clouds, invoices will be generated for this activity including month-to-date costs, projected monthly totals, historical cost data, and a lot more which is discussed in the following sections.

Additionally, Morpheus has implemented a costing service for on-prem clouds to closely mirror the live costing experience through a public cloud. As with public clouds, this costing service is enabled for on-prem clouds through the COSTING field on the Add/Edit Cloud modal (Infrastructure > Clouds > selected Cloud > EDIT button). Change the setting to “Sync Costing” and save the changes to the cloud integration. From this point, costs will be aggregated into invoices for on-prem clouds in the same way as public clouds including complete line item listings, current costs for the month, month-end projections, and much more as discussed in the next sections.

Invoice List Page

The invoices list page shows high-level aggregate data on a group of invoices and allows you to locate a specific invoice for a deeper look. By default, invoices from the last three months across all clouds and types are shown here. Depending on settings, this page can automatically refresh itself so the list of displayed invoices and the aggregate information on them is up to date.

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Aggregated Invoice Data

The following aggregate totals are displayed for all invoices picked up by set filters:

  • Periods: The total number of months in the period determined by your start and end date filters. If no start and end dates are set, a three month period will be shown. If a one-month period is selected, the name of that month (ex. Aug 2020) is shown

  • Total Invoices: The total number of invoices captured by current filters

  • MTD Cost: The combined month-to-date cost for all invoices captured by current filters

  • Total Cost: The expected total month-end cost for all invoices captured by current filters

Creating Views

Invoice list views are highly-customizable allowing for virtually limitless combinations of output columns and filtering. A common set of output columns is provided in a default view but users can add and remove columns from a large list of data points and even save multiple views for easy access to different data sets. Any of your stored views can be set as the default to be displayed each time the invoices list page is active.

To create a new invoices view:

  1. Click the gear icon ()

  2. Click on one or more columns from the “Columns” list to add or remove an output field

  3. Click “+ add view”

  4. Provide a name and a description value for your new view

  5. If desired, mark the box to set the new view as your default view so it appears automatically each time the invoices list page is accessed

  6. Click SAVE

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Available Output Columns

When creating an invoices view, there are many output columns available to select. Consult the list below for more details on each of the available columns:

Available Output Columns: Expand for Complete List


Invoice Types

Invoices can reference any of the Morpheus workload element types or resource reference types in the list below. Some invoice types are broader and may account for resource costs calculated in other narrower invoice types. For instance, a container-type invoice returns costs for a single node of an Instance while an Instance-type invoice for the same period may be including costs for that same single node. The invoices list view can be filtered to show just one type or all types. Complete descriptions of each invoice type are included below:

  • Cloud: In Morpheus, a Cloud is any connection into a public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or bare metal server

  • Container: A single node of a service, in other words, a single node of a Morpheus Instance. This could be a virtual machine or Docker container which is part of a Morpheus-managed Instance

  • Group: In Morpheus, Groups define which resources a user has access to through their role. Clouds are added to Groups and users access Clouds to which their roles give access

  • Server: A server refers to any individual host, virtual machine, or bare metal server that is inventoried or managed by Morpheus. This can include servers which are parts of Morpheus-managed Instances or inventoried servers from integrated Clouds

  • Instance: A set of containers or virtual machines which correlate to a single horizontally-scalable entity. This could be a single VM or it could be many VMs operating as a service

  • Resource: Resource-type invoices are generated when Morpheus cannot determine that the referenced costs belong to any of the other resource reference types in this list

  • User: User-type invoices aggregate the costs of resources owned by a specific Morpheus user during the invoicing period

  • Volume: When possible, costs will be tied to known volumes and a volume-type invoice is generated as a result

Invoice Detail Page

Summary

The summary tab of the invoice detail page displays a great deal of reference information about the resource identified by the invoice. This will vary depending on the type of resource. In addition, total and projected costs are displayed along with cost breakdowns for compute, storage, network, and other categories. Month-to-date totals and final month projections are given.

History

The history tab displays the costs and prices for the associated resource over time. This tab is especially valuable for resources that have existed through at least a few invoicing periods to show changes over time. In addition, cost breakdowns for compute, storage, network, and other categories are shown for each invoicing period. These costs can be displayed visually through graphs.

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Line Items

For supported resource types, Morpheus includes a tab to display all costing line items. This provides the user with a complete list of line items that make up the costing totals on the invoice.

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