Skip to content

NCD – Navisite Cloud Director Billing Guide

← Navisite Cloud Director (NCD) – General

Navisite Cloud Director® (NCD) uses points as a standard cost unit for calculating CPU, memory, bandwidth, storage, replication usage, and other charges. Points are converted to a currency charge on your monthly invoice according to the terms of your contract.

Account Billing Page Overview

Your account's NCD Billing page provides summary and detail views of the elements and usage that make up your Navisite Cloud Director billing.

Viewing the NCD Billing Page

To view your account's NCD Billing page:
  • At the Dashboard page, click NCD BILLING in the "Admin" section of the navigation bar on the left side of the page.



  • The NCD Billing page displays your billing total data for the current and preceding months.

  • Click the Table and Chart buttons to switch between tabular and chart representations of your billing data.

  • The Table view displays your total cost in points for each month, and allows you to view and/or download detailed monthly billing summaries.

  • The Chart view also displays your total cost in points for each month, and includes a projection of your billing for the current month, extrapolated from your existing monthly charges.


Viewing Your Rate Card

The various Navisite Cloud Director billing pages (e.g., the NCD Billing, vDataCenter Summary, vDataCenter Detail and vApp Detail billing pages) provide either a View Current Rate Card or View Rate Card button allowing you to view your current rate card, or a rate card for a previous month.



Your rate card details:
  • Time periods and units for resources actually billed

  • Estimated hourly, daily, or monthly costs for comparison and planning (click the appropriate button to change the duration of the estimate)


The rate card displays billing data for your currently utilized resources (e.g., CPU, memory, storage, and replication, for example). Rate card content may change depending on resources used.

Downloading/Viewing Monthly Billing Summaries

The NCD Billing page allows you to view a billing summary providing cost details per vDataCenter (vDC) for a selected month. You can also download a comma-separated values (CSV) file providing the same information in plain text for offline analysis.

Downloading a Monthly Billing Summary

To download a comma-separated values (CSV) file providing cost details per vDataCenter for a selected month:
  • Click the Download complete data link for the desired month in the NCD Billing page table.



Viewing a Monthly Billing Summary

To display the vDataCenter Summary page to view a monthly billing summary for your vDCs:
  • In the NCD Billing page Table view, click the link in the "Month" column for the desired month.


  • In the NCD Billing page Chart view, click the chart bar for the desired month.


The vDataCenter Summary page provides a pie chart and a table detailing your monthly point totals for each of your vDCs.


Viewing Monthly vDataCenter Billing Details

To display the vDataCenter Detail page to view a monthly billing summary for a selected vDC:
  • As illustrated above, click the desired vDataCenter link in the "Object" column of the vDataCenter Summary page table, or click the portion of the pie chart corresponding to the desired vDC.
The vDataCenter Detail page provides a pie chart and a table detailing your monthly point totals for the selected vDC's constituent vApps, as well as their CPU, Memory, Storage, Replication, Networking, and other costs (e.g., VM Backup, Red Hat licensing).


  • To view actual usage numbers and the point cost calculation, click the "info" icon next to the point values in the tables.



    • Note: Networking-related charges (public IPs and outgoing bandwidth) are only collected and displayed at the vDataCenter level.

Viewing Monthly vApp Billing Details

To display the vApp Detail page to view a monthly billing summary for a selected vApp object:
  • As illustrated above, click the desired vApp object link in the "Object" column of the vDataCenter Detail page table, or click the portion of the pie chart corresponding to the desired vApp object.
The vApp Detail page provides a pie chart and a table detailing your monthly point totals for the selected vApp's constituent virtual machines (VMs), as well as their CPU, Memory, Storage, Replication, and other costs.


  • To view actual usage numbers and the point cost calculation, click the "info" icon next to the point values in the table.


Viewing Detail Page Billing Information

Each vDataCenter, vApp, and VM detail page in Navisite Cloud Director provides a "Billing" section, which displays a graph of monthly billing data for that object over time. "Projected" indicators on the graphs represent estimated costs for the current month.


Viewing Estimated Costs

Each vDataCenter, vApp, and VM detail page in Navisite Cloud Director also provides an estimated cost for the object (labeled as "Estimated Cost" for vDataCenters, "Stopped/Running/Current Cost" for vApps, and "Powered On Cost" for VMs), displayed at the top of the page.



A monthly estimated cost is displayed by default, but the displayed estimate can be changed to hourly or daily. To do so:
  1. Click the "gear" icon, and select Hourly, Daily, or Monthly from the resulting drop-down menu.

    2. Note: Monthly estimates are based on a 30-day month.


  2. Click the green check mark button to change the time interval, or the X button to cancel the change.
Cost estimates also appear at Template detail pages, locations related to copying or adding objects, and other pages where such estimates can prove helpful.

Viewing Estimated vApp Costs

vApp objects have three possible states: Running, Partially Running, and Stopped.

Partially Running vApps contain VMs that are in different states ("Powered On" and "Powered Off").

Note: Powered Off VMs consume only storage resources, and not CPU or memory resources.

For Partially Running vApps, the estimated cost is labeled "Current Cost." A vApp's cost estimate for its current state is displayed in black, and estimates for other states ("Stopped" and "Running") are grayed out.


Viewing Cost Estimation Details

To view details of the point cost estimate:
  • Click the "info" icon next to the point value, as illustrated above. The Cost Estimation Details pop-up window appears.


The Cost Estimation Details pop-up window displays itemized and total estimated CPU, Memory, Storage, and other costs as follows:
  • vDataCenter cost estimation details include estimated Media and Template, Networking, and vApp costs.

  • vApp cost estimation details include estimated Powered Off and Powered On costs for each VM in the vApp.

  • VM cost estimation details include estimated Powered Off and Powered On costs for the VM.

Configuring Billing Alerts

Navisite Cloud Director can be configured to alert users (either upon login or via email) when…
  • resource consumption exceeds or is projected to exceed a specified number of billing points.

  • resource consumption increases or is projected to increase over the previous month's consumption by a specified percentage.
Such alerts can be applied to your total monthly billing charge, or to charges for particular object (e.g., vDataCenter, vApp, or VM charges) in your environment.

Note: You must be assigned the Navisite Cloud Director "administrator" role to add, edit, or delete alerts.

Billing alerts are displayed or emailed once daily. Alerts can be dismissed for the duration of a particular login session (for non-email alerts only) by clicking Dismiss for now, or dismissed for a month by clicking Dismiss for the month.



Note: When an alert is dismissed for a month, the Alerts page subsequently includes an Undo Dismissal button, allowing you to resume the dismissed alert.

Click the Manage alerts link in the billing alert message to view the Alerts page.

Example Alerts


Exceeds – if a charge has exceeded the specified alert threshold, the following alert message is generated:

Warning: This month's charge is XX points, which exceeds an alert threshold of YY points.

Projected – if the current month's billing is projected to exceed the specified alert threshold, the following alert message is generated:

Warning: If current usage continues, this month's NCD billing charge is projected to be XX points, which exceeds an alert threshold of YY points.

Viewing the NCD Alerts Page

The NCD Alerts page lists any configured alerts for your account. To view your account's NCD Alerts page:
  • At the Dashboard page, click NCD ALERTS in the "Admin" section of the navigation bar on the left side of the page.



Creating/Editing Alerts

The NCD Alerts page allows you to create new alerts or edit existing alerts as follows:
  1. To create a new alert, click +Create Alert. To edit an existing alert, click the "gear" icon in the NCD Alerts page table for the desired alert. The Create/Edit Alert page appears.



  2. To apply the alert to your total monthly billing charge, select the Total NCD account charge (monthly) radio button.

    To apply the alert to charges for particular object, select the Specific object's monthly cost radio button. A list of objects in your environment appears, allowing you to select a specific object's charges (e.g., vDataCenter, vApp, or VM charges) for the alert.



  3. From the "Condition" drop-down menu, select a condition on which the alert is to be based.

    • Select exceeds to trigger the alert when the cost exceeds a specified billing point threshold.

    • Select increases to trigger the alert when the cost increases over the previous month's total by a specified percentage threshold.

  4. In the "Threshold" field, specify an alert threshold value.

    • If exceeds is selected from the "Condition" drop-down menu, specify a number of billing points in the "Threshold" field.

    • If increases is selected from the "Condition" drop-down menu, specify a percentage in the "Threshold" field.

  5. Select a "Notification Method" option for the alert.

    • To receive the alert within the NCD application, select the In-App checkbox.

    • To receive the alert by email, select the Email checkbox, and select the checkbox(es) for the desired email recipients. To specify additional email recipients, click +Add Email and enter the desired email address in the "Additional Email Recipients" field.

  6. Click Add/Edit Alert to add or edit the alert, or click Cancel to cancel the operation.

Enabling/Disabling Alerts

To enable or disable an existing alert, click Enable or xDisable in the NCD Alerts page table for the desired alert, and confirm the operation.

Deleting Alerts

To delete an existing alert, click Delete in the NCD Alerts page table for the desired alert, and confirm the operation. The alert is removed from the NCD Alerts page table.




Feedback and Knowledge Base

(thinking…)