Configure on premise billing

Prepare to use on premise billing

Before you begin:

1. Configure pricing. Abiquo will generate billing for enteprises with pricing models
   See Pricing view and Pricing for resellers

   1. Create extra charges with cost codes. See Manage extra charges with cost codes

   2. Create price factors to add markup for providers. See Manage price factors

   3. Assign pricing models to your cloud tenant enterprises or reseller hierarchy

2. Stop the old Abiquo billing integration by commenting out the command lines in the cron files for abiquo-billing, abiquo-billing-mapping, and abiquo-billing-private
   See Stop the Abiquo billing integration

3. In Abiquo 6.1, on-premise billing does not output a CSV file. If you are already running the CSV generator, you do not need to change anything to work with on-premise billing. Otherwise, please contact Abiquo Support to obtain the CSV generator.

Activate on premise billing

To activate on-premise billing:

1. Go to Configuration → Billing

2. Select the Enable on premise billing checkbox

3. Select the usage types to bill

4. Click Save

Abiquo billing will now generate billing data for all enterprises with a pricing model.

Open

Activate on-premise billing in Configuration view

Automatic billing generation

To display billing data on the dashboard, users may need to wait 24 hours. It may take longer for Abiquo to display billing estimates.

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 for the last bills widget.

On-premise billing uses the same cron job as public cloud billing, and you can use Abiquo configuration properties to customize it. See Abiquo configuration properties for the abiquo.billing.task.cron property.

To manually run billing, see Update pricing and generate billing

Control how often users can generate billing data

By default, users can generate billing once per day per enterprise 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. To customize this limit, change theabiquo.billing.execution.limit property.
For more details, see Abiquo configuration properties.

Access billing data via database or API

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

In Abiquo 6.1, the API data is available from Cost usage, Bill registers, and Bills resources. See Abiquo API Reference. And you can also access billing data in the billing_consolidation table in the Abiquo database.

Customize billing provider name

The name of the billing provider will display on the enterprise Billing tab and on the billing dashboard widgets.

In Abiquo 6.1.0, to customize the name of the on-premise billing provider on the enterprise Billing tab:

1. On the Abiquo UI server, edit the custom language file at /var/www/html/ui/lang/lang_en_US_custom.json and add the following label:

   "pricing.billing.on.premise":"New provider name"

To customize the name of the on-premise billing provider on the billing dashboard widgets:

1. On the Abiquo API server, in the abiquo.properties file, set the abiquo.billing.onpremise.provider.name property, and restart the API tomcat server. For example:

   abiquo.billing.onpremise.provider.name=New provider name

   For more details see Abiquo configuration properties.

Display billing data on the dashboard

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

Open

Display billing graph on the dashboard

To display on-premise billing, users can select the ONPREMISE billing provider, or the custom provider name.

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.

Update pricing and billing

See Update pricing and generate billing