Alguna supports various billable metrics in order to meter usage. These metrics describe how to aggregate a set of billable events over a period of time.
1

Billable Metric Details

Start by defining the Billable Metric that will track and aggregate customer usage for billing purposes.
  • Metric Name: Provide a clear, concise name for your metric (e.g., “API Requests”).
  • Description: Describe what the metric measures (e.g., “Tracks the number of API requests made by the customer”).
2

Choose Events

Next, select the event or events that will contribute to your billable metric. Events represent individual customer actions or transactions that should be aggregated for billing.
  • Event Name: Start typing to either create a new event or select an existing event from the dropdown.
3

Filter by Property (Optional)

Optionally, you can apply filters to further refine your metric by selecting specific event properties. This helps narrow down which events should be counted toward the billable metric.
  • Property Name: Choose the property name you want to filter by (e.g., “region”).
  • Condition: Select a condition such as equals to, contains, or does not contain.
  • Property Value: Specify the property value that should be matched (e.g., “US”).
4

Aggregation Method

Choose how the events should be aggregated to calculate the final value for your billable metric.
  • Aggregation Type: Select how you want to calculate the metric, such as:
    • count: The number of events that match the metric.
    • sum: The sum of the values of the specified field.
    • average: The average of the values of the specified field.
    • min: The minimum value of the specified field.
    • max: The maximum value of the specified field.
  • Over Property: Specify the event property that will be used for aggregation (e.g., “value” or “duration”).

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Example

Let’s say you have a SaaS application that has mixed pricing based on the number of seats and API requests used. You are a global company and therefore you have APIs deployed in NA, EMEA and APAC, and a customer is charged differently based on which region they are using. In this case you would want to send two types of events:
  • merchant_seat_changed: This event would be sent when a new user is added or removed from the merchant’s account. This event would have a total_seats property that would be the total number of users on the account.
  • api_request: This event would be sent when a customer makes an API request. This event would have a region property that would be the region that the API request was made to, and a value that describes the number of requests used.
And create metrics:
  • Merchant Seats: You may want to aggregate by average or max depending on how you want to charge your customers.
  • API Requests (NA): Filtered by region = NA and aggregated by sum.
  • API Requests (EMEA): Filtered by region = EMEA and aggregated by sum.
  • API Requests (APAC): Filtered by region = APAC and aggregated by sum.

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Ingesting Events

See the Meter Usage page for more information on how to ingest events.