While nice on paper, chargeback and showback present complicated challenges for virtualization- and cloud-based data centers. To successfully implement these concepts, organizations must carefully evaluate their company-wide and IT objectives.

First, you need to determine if you are looking to simply report on resource consumption or potentially charge tenants for their resource utilization. If you sell hosting services, the answer is obvious: You need chargeback. But even within the corporate environment, more IT departments are looking to become profit centers, and must evaluate whether they need full-fledged chargeback, or simply showback.

Where showback is used purely to track utilization without billing, chargeback is used to bill tenants for resource consumption.  And each model has its own considerations and challenges.

To explore this topic in more details, check out my TechTarget article “Chargeback vs. showback: Which method is best for you?“, then come back here to leave any comments.