Printing as a Service - Metering Setup Guide

Owned by Jonas Brandvik
Last updated: Aug 30, 2024 by Felicity Borrelli
2 min read

To process usage using the Printing as Service stream, you must create the meter type (the product you want to meter) and the meters (the bucket to measure the usage per customer for the product). This step is usually done using APIs called from an external system. For convenience, there have been additional streams provided which can be executed to do this configuration.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can provision meters and meter types for the example stream Printing As A Service with Metering.

The helper streams can be copied from the links and can be imported using the Usage Engine user interface:

  1. Provisioning Meter Types - This stream helps to create the meter type Pay-per-print, which is a product definition for measuring prints done by each printer. It uses the aggregation type SUM and has the reset interval set to Monthly meaning that the golden record is sent downstream once the month has ended.

  2. Provisioning Meters - This stream provisions the meters for printers with the printer ID as the key (user ID).

  3. Purge Meters - This is an additional stream to clean up meters post-processing.

Step 1

Create a new application access for your account. This is needed for authenticating with the Usage Engine APIs, see Application Access.

Step 2

Create a new secret in the secrets wallet of type OAuth 2.0 containing your application credentials. Select the authentication type “Client credentials“ and add the client ID and client secret which was created in the previous step, see Secret Wallets.

Step 3

Import all helper streams using the above links.

Step 4

Update the authentication in all streams with your new secret. Ensure that the audience and access token URL of the OAuth2 authentication is configured to match your Environments API base URL.

Step 5

Run stream 1. Provisioning Meter Types. After the stream has completed you will have a new meter type named "Pay-per-print" in the Usage metering view.

Step 6

Open the stream configuration for Printing As A Service with Metering and copy the meter key from the Meter processor for later.

Step 7

Open the stream configuration of stream 2. Provisioning Meters and open the script named "Prepare Meters". Paste in the meter key that you got from the previous step.

Step 8

Run stream 2. Provisioning Meters. When the stream has completed, you will have 5 meters across your newly created meter type.

Step 9

The meters you created in the previous step are now associated with the Meter processor in the Printing As A Service with Metering stream.

Run the stream. When it has completed, you will be able to see the aggregated values from the input records in the Meter Inspector.

Step 10 (Optional)

If you want to delete your meters. Navigate to the stream configuration of stream 3. Purge Meters. Paste the meter key into the script "Prepare Filter". Run the stream. Now all meters related to Printing As A Service with Metering have been deleted.