On premise billing

In Abiquo 6.1, on-premise billing for private cloud is now integrated into the Abiquo platform. This improves the cloud platform’s FinOps capabilities, and customers can now display their previous bills and estimated bill on the dashboard.

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On premise billing displays on the dashboard

Abiquo on-premise billing records your resource usage on an hourly basis, and uses Abiquo pricing models to create monthly bills per calendar month, using UTC dates and times. Abiquo pricing continues to support other accounting and billing combinations for backward compatibility.

For testing and upgrade purposes you can run the old billing integration and the new on-premise billing at the same time. However, first, you should stop the private-billing process to update the dashboard from the old billing integration.

You can now manage on-premise billing through the UI. To enable billing and select the resource usages to bill, go to Configuration view, where there is a new Billing tab. If you disable a usage, then there will be no cost for its resources.

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Activate on-premise billing in Configuration view

There is a new usage type of Backup GB and you can now set a price for this usage. See Billing for backups per GB.

Abiquo 6.1 creates a pricing history. By default, when an administrator changes prices, Abiquo will apply the new price to the next month.

To apply new prices to the current month, in the pricing model, you can Regenerate billing to update pricing and regenerate billing for this month. This deletes the current billing period for enterprises using this pricing model, including current cost calculations (billregisters of cost usage, and estimated bill). Then it creates the billing period again, with the current pricing model and it also runs on-premise billing for the current month for the affected enterprises.

When you regenerate billing data for previous months, Abiquo on-premise billing will use the historical pricing data.

Pricing in Abiquo 6.1 also has a new Price factors view where you can manage multiple markups or discounts for public and private cloud. To apply the price factors to multiple enterprises, click Edit enterprise associations, and enter or edit values. For public cloud, Abiquo also enables you to easily obtain your cloud partner bills, remove your reseller discount, and apply your markup to your customer bills for your reseller hierarchy. For more details, see Manage price factors and Display cloud provider billing data.

In Abiquo 6.1 you can use the new extra charges (previously, cost codes) to bill for enterprise products, including subscriptions, and one-time charges, instead of using custom MySQL as in previous versions. See Manage extra charges with cost codes.

Abiquo will automatically process usage data and create billing for enterprises with a pricing model overnight each day (generating the Estimated bill data), and at the end of the month, it consolidates the bills. On-premise billing uses the same cron job as public cloud billing, and you can use Abiquo configuration properties to customize it.

In addition to the automatic daily billing process, you can generate billing manually in the UI. To access this functionality, you can edit the enterprise via users view or from the user icon menu. Then go to Billing and select the provider, then click Regenerate billing. Abiquo controls access to this feature as for public cloud with the Generate billing privilege.

By default, you can regenerate billing once per day in the user interface. The default value of the Abiquo configuration property to limit how many times an enterprise can generate billing is 2, which also includes the automatic billing generation.

If your enterprise is a reseller, you can also select the enterprises from your hierarchy to generate billing for.

On-premise billing data is available to administrators through the Abiquo database or API.

On-premise billing data displays on the billing widgets (already on the default Hybrid dashboard), including detailed cost-usage breakdowns.

To display on-premise billing, users can select the ONPREMISE billing provider. You can customize the name of this provider with an Abiquo property.

And you can use the on-premise billing data in other areas of the platform, such as budgets, which can alert users and trigger automation using action plans, as in public cloud.

In future releases, Abiquo will also add some information to the UI to display a price per VM, which will be available because the platform stores the cost and usage information at the resource level.

Related pages:

For full details of how to configure this feature, see Configure on premise billing
For details of how to generate billing for users, see Update pricing and generate billing