Hi Dan (et all),

you know that the customers are always unsatisfied....:-(

The first important stuff would be to have in place the metrics of consumption of the

resources some hoster "sell" to a customer. So usage metrics on

CPU / RAM / DISK / Network (over provisioned or not is another story)

There is an aspect on actual usage versus provisioned usage.

{vm provisioned 10 GB of RAM bus os+app uses just 5 GB of them etc)

But let's keep it simple.

Should we have the usage reference then a GUI that the can define

the cost plans, would be ideal. A way to query if possible that

database, would ease existing ERPs and invoicing software to

produce / send invoices. This is for mostly post paid use cases.

For prepaid situations, there must be some regular accounting that

will stop the service through our current API. It sounds a bit scaring to

actually shutdown the provisioned vm. So at least on first step stop the

networking ....

I guess that the base is to create a separate database that will keep the

consumed metrics, so that customers could actually use it to

enforce some business logic. (as explained above).

Should there be a minimal gui that could a small hoster create

his owns plans and perhaps issue some "invoice" would be ideal.

Since there are a number of open source billing systems out there,

perhaps the integration is not that complicated. A second thought would

be to extend the data ware house gui to create the "invoice" outputs

as most of the usage info is there.

I know that ovirt is supposed to be a virtualization solution and not

a full monty billing system.

Thanks for reading so far.

Nikos

Nikos

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2014-11-20 15:08 GMT+02:00 Dan Kenigsberg <danken@redhat.com>:

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 02:20:46PM +0200, Nikos Zaharioudakis wrote:
> Brilliant,
>
> Thanks for the info gents
> Looking forward for 3.6 then :-)

Just waiting may not be enough: I'd love to understand what are the
metrics you'd like to use for billing.

I mentioned cummulative values of network, storage, and cpu per VM. Can
you consider anything else? The latter two are begging for an RFE to be
open, as well as the report-centric RFE requested by Shirly.