NSS Dashboard Usage (Chargeback) tailored to customer pricing

[TraceyBunyard]

One of the NSS features is to use the dashboard to show usage and charging information. Can we use this feature to show client, the consumption and the charging for the same? The charging would be based upon the our backup services pricing schedule.

What is the best practices from other service providers who use NetBackup to provide managed backup services to their clients? How is the consumption data computed from the Netbackup application is used for billing purposes for the end users?

[TraceyBunyard · Accepted solution]

NSS displays consumption information in the form of protected space per machine per month and the user can download it as a text file for processing in Excel or access the data via the API.

NSS consumption figures are always about protected space, not space taken by the backups on disk or where backups are stored (e.g. Disk vs tape) or the impact of dedup/accelerator technologies.

Optionally a fixed charge per Protected GB can be added (the charge can be different for each tenant) and this is also visible by the tenant.

The NSS consumption data is available through the API so it can be incorporated into the billing system as for MSPs, BaaS is just one of the services they offer and the BaaS charge is incorporated with the billing for other services (e.g. Networking, hosting, support etc.).

Lots of MSPs use OpsCenter for extracting consumption data, as their pricing model requires information that is not available in NSS (e.g. charge per type of storage).