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The Usage Metering relationship diagram is illustrated below:

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Usage Metering Data Model

Common usage metering concepts

Here you will find descriptions of some commonly used terms within usage metering. The italicized text refers to a concept shown in the above flow chart.

Meter Type - A meter type is a representation of a product that you want to offer your customers on a usage-based billing model, for example, a streaming service where customers pay for the number of streamed items over a monthly period. The meter type is created in the Usage metering interface and configured with aggregation, and category. It is also given a unique identifier ie, meter type id.

Meter Type Id - The meter type id is a unique Id for the meter type. It is used when creating a meter for a customer (user id) to define which product the customer has chosen.

Aggregation - Usage metering supports four aggregation types - sum, increment, min, and max. You define how the usage data should be aggregated before being sent to downstream billing systems in the meter type.

Category - The meter type must have a category. One category can be used for multiple meter types. category is a way of grouping the meter types that can be impacted by the same set of usage data.

User Id - The user id identifies the customer the meter belongs to, for example, an email address, user name, or MSISDN number.

Meter Processor - The meter processor is a processing function that you add to a stream. It collects the usage data and forwards it to the downstream billing system. It is configured with guiding rules that determine which meters should be updated. It is also given a unique identifier, the meter key.

Meter Key - The meter key is a unique identifier for the meter processor. It is used when creating a meter for a customer (user id) to specify where the collected usage data is directed to the meter.

Guiding Rule - A guiding rule helps usage data records to be directed to the correct meter for which usage should be updated. A meter processor may have one or several guiding rules, each of which defines a category of meter types for which usage should be calculated. The guiding rule may also consist of one or more conditions, grouped by fields and other operations.

Conditions - Conditions can be configured to only aggregate usage for records where specific fields have specific values in the usage data, for example, only aggregate usage records where the field “downloadStatus” has the value “Successful”. These criteria are configured in the guiding rules. You can use other functions to enrich the data before sending it to the Meter Processor to enrich the data.

Meter - A meter is a representation of a customer’s bucket which is used to measure the usage of the product. The meters are created using APIs and reference the meter type id of the meter type and meter key of the meter processor. The meter is configured for a customer which is defined by the user id.

Usage Data - Usage data is the data you need to collect to calculate the usage of a product, for example, the number of streamed items, or the number of minutes using a service. This data is collected using a stream in which you can add functions for verifying and correcting data before it is processed by the meter processor. You can also add functions to transform the data before it is forwarded to downstream billing systems.