Billing
Introduction
Subscription Feature
This is a feature which is currently only included in the Subscription Edition of Observium.
The traffic accounting module is a method of storing every measurement for a port or set of ports in a database to make it possible to generate bills from the data, as opposed to the fixed-size round-robin database format used by rrdtool which uses averaging techniques which renders the data useless for billing.
The accounting system will help you to calculate usage and overage values for 95th percentile and traffic quota based billing methods. Multiple graphs and charts are provided giving insight into traffic patterns to assist in upselling of services to customers.
Traffic measurement data is retained indefinitely and allows regeneration of graphs and charts at any point in the future.
An example of the accounting system in operation can be seen on the Observium Demo.
Configuration and Use
Enabling Billing
Enable the billing system in your config.php by adding the following line:
$config['enable_billing'] = 1;
Scheduling Poller
Add the following line to your crontab to enable the separate billing poller. Please note that this poller currently doesn't allow multiple instances.
The status of each bill is generated periodically by another script, which you can run at different intervals.
*/5 * * * * root /opt/observium/observium-wrapper billing >> /dev/null 2>&1
01 * * * * root /opt/observium/billing-calculate.php >> /dev/null 2>&1
If you don't run your poller as root, change the user. Similarly change the path if you didn't install to /opt/observium.
Configure a Bill
You can now go to the "Ports" menu on your Observium installation and click the new "Billing" option. This will take you to a page where you can view existing bills and add new ones.