Billing Codes

Billing Codes

enStratus financial controls allow for a useful feature set for setting quotas and limiting costs incurred in the cloud.

Billing codes are a useful method for tracking and controlling infrastructure costs.

enStratus tracks infrastructure costs based on the costs reported by the cloud provider or in the case of an on-premise installation of enStratus, against a customizable set of values.

enStratus calculates costs based on the hourly run rate for usage. Servers, storage, load bal- ancers, databases, and IP Addresses are all examples of items that have an associated cost in many of the public clouds. The values for each of these items is used to calculate a run rate and project costs.

In diagram above, there are six total billing codes. Two billing codes are green, two are yellow, and two are red. Billing codes are color coded for quick reference regarding the state of the billing code.

Color	Meaning
Green	Run rate has not exceeded and additional infrastructure/capacity may be charged against this code.
Yellow	Run rate has exceeded the soft quota limit. An email warning will be sent, but additional infrastructure/capacity may be charged against this code.
Red	Run rate exceeded the hard quota. An email message will be sent. No additional infrastructure/capacity may be charged against this code.

Definitions

RUN RATE: The run rate is the calculated usage per hour costs for all of the infrastructure being tracked against this code.

CURRENT USAGE: The current usage is the total charges tracked against the billing code up to the current point in the month. For example, if 10 days of the month have elapsed, the current usage value should be approximately one third of the projected usage.

PROJECTED USAGE: The projected usage is the projected total usage costs for the month based on the current run rate.

Email Warning Messages

An example of the email message that is sent when the soft quota is exceeded is shown below:

Soft Quota Exceeded
New Cloud Event: Wed 01 Dec 2010 02:59:41 UTC Cloud: Amazon Web Services
Account: Company Subject: NEW EVENT #312218 (Severity 5) - Monthly Soft Run-Rate Exceeded for Company Company (YACNGH)

The current run-rate of usage against the billing code Company Company (YACNGH) exceeds the alloted soft run rate for this budget.

If you need assistance understanding this message or if you believe this message is the result of an issue with enStratus, please visit our support site at https://support.enstratus.com and login with your standard enStratus login credentials.

To check on the status of enStratus itself, visit: http://status.enstratus.com

Subscribe to live status updates via RSS at http://status.enstratus.com/status.xml or via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/enStratusStatus.

An example of the email message that is sent when the hard quota is exceeded is shown below:

Hard Quota Exceeded
New Cloud Event: Wed 01 Dec 2010 02:11:15 UTC Cloud: Amazon Web Services Account: Company Acc Subject: NEW EVENT #312214 (Severity 7) - Monthly Hard Run-Rate Exceeded for Website (WWW)

The current run-rate of usage against the billing code Website (WWW) exceeds the alloted hard run rate for this budget. As a result, no one will be able to provision resources against this budget until the run-rate falls within the hard quota. You may remedy the situation either by increasing the hard quota for this budget or reducing the current spend against the budget.

If you need assistance understanding this message or if you believe this message is the result of an issue with enStratus, please visit our support site at https://support.enstratus.com and login with your standard enStratus login credentials.

To check on the status of enStratus itself, visit: http://status.enstratus.com

Subscribe to live status updates via RSS at http://status.enstratus.com/status.xml or via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/enStratusStatus.

It is important to note that if the hard quota has been breached, enStratus will not take any drastic actions such as deleting infrastructure to bring the run rate below the quota.

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Users

Users may be a part of one or more billing codes as shown in the user profile, located in User Manager > Users.

In this case, the user is a part of three billing codes: Default, Demonstration, and Development.

Referring back to the overall billing code listing, it becomes apparent that the Default billing code has exceeded the hard quota.

To see the functionality of billing codes and how they can be used to restrict a users ability to provision infrastructure, let’s try to start a server from a machine image and examine the billing code options presented.

enStratus hides billing codes that have exceeded their hard quota from use in the enStratus console. If a user is only a part of one billing code, that user will be unable to provision any resources.

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Creating and Editing Billing Codes

To create a billing code, navigate to Finance > Billing Codes. The list of active billing codes will be shown as in Figure 1. To add a new billing code, select + add billing code and complete the resulting dialog box.

Once the dialog box is complete, the new billing code will be added to the list of available billing codes.

NOTE: Before the billing code is available to be used, the user must add that code to their profile using User Manager.

To edit a billing code, click on the actions option and choose edit.

Once the changes are made, the list of billing codes will be updated immediately.

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Deactivating Billing Codes

When a billing code is deactivated, a replacement code must be specified. Any infrastruc- ture/services being tracked against the billing code set for deactivation will be tracked in the replacement code going forward. Historical data will still be available via reports in the old billing code.

To deactivate a billing code, select the code marked for deactivation, click on actions, and choose deactivate.

Once a replacement code is selected and the deactivation is confirmed, the deactivated code is removed from the active list.

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