openstack team mailing list archive

[Joshua Harlow <harlowja@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Agreed, I would get as much low-level data as possible and let other systems combine that as they want to form whatever billing model they choose.

On 4/30/12 6:49 AM, "Doug Hellmann" <doug.hellmann@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 6:46 AM, Loic Dachary <loic@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 04/30/2012 12:15 PM, Loic Dachary wrote:
> We could start a discussion from the content of the following sections:
>
> http://wiki.openstack.org/EfficientMetering#Counters
I think the rationale of the counter aggregation needs to be explained. My understanding is that the metering system will be able to deliver the following information: 10 floating IPv4 addresses were allocated to the tenant during three months and were leased from provider NNN. From this, the billing system could add a line to the invoice : 10 IPv4, $N each = $10xN because it has been configured to invoice each IPv4 leased from provider NNN for $N.

It is not the purpose of the metering system to display each IPv4 used, therefore it only exposes the aggregated information. The counters define how the information should be aggregated. If the idea was to expose each resource usage individually, defining counters would be meaningless as they would duplicate the activity log from each OpenStack component.

What do you think ?

At DreamHost we are going to want to show each individual resource (the IPv4 address, the instance, etc.) along with the charge information. Having the metering system aggregate that data will make it difficult/impossible to present the bill summary and detail views that we want. It would be much more useful for us if it tracked the usage details for each resource, and let us aggregate the data ourselves.

If other vendors want to show the data differently, perhaps we should provide separate APIs for retrieving the detailed and aggregate data.

Doug