Abiquo accounting services integration

1 Introduction to Abiquo accounting service
2 Configure accounting of resources
3 Description of resources for accounting
4 Get accounting parameters
5 How to enable or disable accounting of resources
6 Advanced accounting configuration topics

Introduction to Abiquo accounting service

The Abiquo accounting service is a usage metering system. The basic use case is to charge users on a pay per use basis for private cloud resources. The Abiquo accounting service records how much of each resource a tenant uses in a virtual datacenter or datacenter. For example, if a user deploys 5 VMs for a total of 25 hours each, then by default the system will record 125 VM hours during the accounting period. The resources to account are fully configurable and you can also create your own custom resources and queries for managed services. And you can use the Abiquo billing integration to create a file for your billing system and you can display private cloud data on user billing dashboards.

This is a basic technical overview of the Abiquo accounting system:

Abiquo records when users reserve or use resources in the kinton_accounting DB.
The administrator configures the resources to account and the accounting periods used.
Some accounting procedures are run periodically to consolidate/update resource usage and purge old records.

This diagram gives an overview of the main areas of the accounting process.

Configure accounting of resources

To configure accounting of resources:

Check the resources that Abiquo can account
Get the accounting parameters from the accounting database to check their names and their status (enabled or disabled)
Enable or disable resources as required in the accounting database

These steps are described in the following sections.

Description of resources for accounting

Abiquo stores data about the usage of these resources in the Accounting events tables.

Then the Administrator can configure which resources to account in the Accounting event detail table.

The resources shaded in blue in the table are disabled by default.

Accounting resources table

Resource	Description	Unit	Billing type	Association

Resource	Description	Unit	Billing type	Association
Cores	vCPUs in VMs created by users	vCPU	Consumption	VM
Cores ON	vCPUs in VMs deployed and running	vCPU	Consumption	VM
Cores OFF	vCPUs in VMs deployed and stopped	vCPU	Consumption	VM
RAM	RAM in VMs created by users	Megabytes	Consumption	VM
RAM ON	RAM in VMs deployed and running	Megabytes	Consumption	VM
RAM OFF	RAM in VMs deployed and stopped	Megabytes	Consumption	VM
Local storage	Disk space connected to the hypervisor as datastores for VM disks, including secondary hard disks	Bytes	Consumption	VM
External storage	Disk space for use as external volumes created by users on VMs	Bytes	Reservation	VM/Independent
Public IPs	IP addresses with Internet access for use by VMs	No. of IP addresses	Reservation	VM/Independent
VLANs	Private VLANs for VMs Unmanaged, external and public network VLANs are not accounted A private VLAN is automatically created when a user creates a VDC	No. of VLANs	Reservation	VDC
Firewall	Firewalls created by the user	No. of Firewalls	Reservation	VDC
Load balancer	Load balancers created by the user	No. of Load Balancers	Reservation	VDC
Hypervisor type	The hypervisor type for the VM	HV type	Consumption	VM
Cost code	Optional cost codes for virtual image templates, hardware profiles, and VMs	Cost code	Consumption	VM
Backup	Backup policies applied to VMs deployed	Backup policy	Consumption	VM
Hardware profile	VM Hardware profile	Hardware profile	Consumption	VM
Hardware profile ON	VM Hardware profile in the ON state	Hardware profile	Consumption	VM
Hardware profile OFF	VM Hardware profile in the OFF state	Hardware profile	Consumption	VM
DR protected VM	VM is protected by the disaster recovery service (DRAAS)	True or false	Consumption	VM
HA hosted VM	VM deployed on an Abiquo high-availability rack	True or false	Consumption	VM
Reserved physical machine cores	CPU of each server that has been explicitly reserved for an enterprise. Recorded even if the server is not being used.	vCPU	Reservation	Enterprise
Reserved physical machine RAM	RAM of each server that has been explicitly reserved for an enterprise. Recorded even if the server is not being used.	Megabytes	Reservation	Enterprise
Repository storage	Repository space is used when: Customers create a VM instance Customers upload disk images into the template repository Abiquo converts instances and templates to other hypervisor formats Abiquo accounts for space used by instances and templates (cases 1 and 2). If you wish to account conversions, create a custom metric (case 3).	Bytes used by each template	Consumption	Enterprise
Anti-affinity VM	VM deployed in an anti-affinity layer separate from other VMs in the same layer	True or false	Consumption	VM
Tiered local datastore storage	Local storage on hypervisor datastores by datastore tiers (including primary and secondary non-persistent hard disks)	Bytes used by each disk	Consumption	VM
Custom	See Custom accounting resource definitions	User defined	User defined	User defined

Key

- Deprecated resource

Get accounting parameters

You can use the ACCOUNTING_CONFIG_VW to view the accounting parameters or you can select directly from the database table.

To get the current accounting parameters, run the query below in kinton_accounting database:

SELECT * FROM accounting_parameters;

The following command output is an example only. You should always use the above command to check the values in your database.

+---------+-------------------------------------+------------+
| idParam | paramName                           | paramValue |
+---------+-------------------------------------+------------+
|       1 | AccountingEnabled                   | 1          |
|       2 | DeleteRegEventsUseSPParam           | 0          |
|       3 | DeleteRegEventsDeleteHours          | 26280      |
|       4 | MaximumPeriodsToFirstInit           | 1          |
|       5 | MaximumPeriodsToProcess             | 24         |
|       6 | AccountPeriodSize                   | HOUR       |
|       7 | AccountPeriodGranularity            | HOUR       |
|       8 | LoggingLevel                        | INFO       |
|       9 | VirtualMachine-vcpu                 | 1          |
|      10 | VirtualMachine-vram                 | 1          |
|      11 | VirtualMachine-vhd                  | 1          |
|      12 | VirtualMachine-vtierhd              | 1          |
|      13 | VirtualMachine-backup               | 1          |
|      14 | ExternalStorage                     | 1          |
|      15 | IPAddress                           | 1          |
|      16 | VLAN                                | 1          |
|      17 | VirtualMachine-hypervisorType       | 1          |
|      18 | Firewall                            | 1          |
|      19 | LoadBalancer                        | 1          |
|      20 | VirtualMachine-vcpuon               | 1          |
|      21 | VirtualMachine-vcpuoff              | 1          |
|      22 | VirtualMachine-vramon               | 1          |
|      23 | VirtualMachine-vramoff              | 1          |
|      24 | VirtualMachine-hp                   | 1          |
|      25 | VirtualMachine-hpon                 | 1          |
|      26 | VirtualMachine-hpoff                | 1          |
|      27 | draas_protection                    | 1          |
|      28 | VirtualMachine-haHosted             | 0          |
|      29 | ReservedPhysicalMachine-cpu         | 0          |
|      30 | ReservedPhysicalMachine-ram         | 0          |
|      31 | RepositoryStorage                   | 0          |
|      32 | VirtualMachine-antiAffinity         | 0          |
|      33 | Consolidation-time-sensitivity-secs | 30         |
|    1113 | costCode                            | 1          |
+---------+-------------------------------------+------------+

To check the value of a specific accounting parameter, use the query below:

SELECT * FROM accounting_parameters WHERE paramName="PARAM_NAME";

How to enable or disable accounting of resources

The resources to use for billing and reporting are stored in the accounting_event_detail table.

To store data for a resource, set the accounting parameter value to 1.

To stop storing data for a resource, set the value to 0.

For example, the VirtualMachine-tierhd accounting resource is disabled by default. To start accounting for VM hard disk storage by datastore tiers, update its value to 1:

Accounting resource parameters table

This is a list of the accounting parameters by name and their default value, where 1 is enabled and 0 is disabled.

Parameter name	Default value
VirtualMachine-vcpu	1
VirtualMachine-vcpuon	1
VirtualMachine-vcpuoff	1
VirtualMachine-vram	1
VirtualMachine-vramon	1
VirtualMachine-vramoff	1
VirtualMachine-vhd	1
ExternalStorage	1
IPAddress	1
VLAN	1
Firewall	1
LoadBalancer	1
VirtualMachine-hypervisorType	1
VirtualMachine-backup	1
draas_protection	1
VirtualMachine-haHosted	0
ReservedPhysicalMachine-cpu	0
ReservedPhysicalMachine-ram	0
RepositoryStorage	0
VirtualMachine-antiAffinity	0
VirtualMachine-tierhd	0
costCode	1

Advanced accounting configuration topics

Here are some advanced accounting topics to further enliven your day.

To change the accounting configuration, see Change the accounting configuration parameters.
The configuration includes the following defaults:
- The minimum accounting period and granularity will account a minimum of 1 unit per HOUR of usage
- The time to keep accounting data is 3 years (of 365 days)
To validate your accounting system, use the Abiquo accounting consistency check. See Abiquo accounting consistency check
- And just in case something goes wrong, see How to recover accounting data
If you would like to know what accounting does on weekends, see Check accounting periodic procedures
For template queries to retrieve accounting data, see Retrieve accounting data
For all the nitty gritty details of accounting, see Abiquo accounting architecture

After you configure Accounting, you can configure the Billing integration to prepare data for billing in CSV or DBMS format