Usage Metering

FAQ

• What is usage metering?

  Usage Metering helps as-a-service companies to launch and optimize usage-based pricing by providing accurate and detailed usage summary records to the billing system, without the need to replace existing billing or other systems. It also supports companies who want to introduce or optimize prepaid business models by tracking and enforcing usage entitlements.

  It’s the method used in business models where customers are charged based on their usage of a product or service. Commonly, metering is used in industries and markets such as cloud computing, streaming services, mobility, software as a service (SaaS), utilities and telecommunications. However, more and more industries and businesses are shifting to offer their products and services based on consumption or outcomes, where metering is an essential function.

  In the digital world, especially with SaaS and cloud services, usage metering tracks the number of active users, storage consumed, compute time, or other metrics that measure how much of the service is being used. Many cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure operate with this model, where you pay for what you use.

  Whereas, in a utility model, for example, customers are billed for the amount of electricity, water, or gas they consume. For telecommunications, charges may be based on the amount of data used, minutes of call time, or number of text messages sent.

• Why usage metering in SaaS

  Anyone looking at offering consumption-based billing, whether you are offering a SaaS digital service or doing product-as-a-service, will for sure need a metering solution.

  But also, anyone who is doing subscription today and is ready to go to the next step: to launch hybrid models for instance, to better understand usage to improve customer experience, or to enforce limits and entitlements to preserve margins and trigger upsell: metering is also a great foundation for such projects.

• What are the core features of Usage Metering by DigitalRoute?

  Usage metering provides easy-to-integrate APIs and out-of-the-box components which let users create a metering solution based on the business case with a low-code experience.

  · Meter types: Meter type is used to define the billing product or service which is to be metered periodically. Meter type need certain essential details along with aggregation type (Sum up, count, min and max). The aggregation type defines what metering operation to perform for all meters of this type. Meter types can be managed both via API and UI.

  · Meter: A meter is defined as a bucket where the usage data is measured for a user or an asset. A meter is created via API once a user or asset enrolls for a certain meter type.

  · Inspection: Inspect individual or multiple meters to check their current state using a UI or API, for easy troubleshooting. The UI also allows quick search to get all meters for a particular user and check their consumption. This is beneficial for customer support when catering to a request concerning an individual user/asset.

  · Note: Editing the meter value via UI or API is not permitted in this phase.

  · Ingestion: Ingest data with all available collectors in Cloud edition. For example, using the Amazon S3 collector, or the HTTP server collector which supports API requests.