Metrics of interest

The VSHN products documentation explains the price model for a business oriented audience. The following breaks this down to a more technical level.

APPUiO Cloud is designed to be generic at its core. This is written from the perspective of VSHN, and it does not necessarily resemble the needs of another company interested to run APPUiO Cloud. This should not be an issue. The architecture is flexible enough to also cover other business models. The only assumption is: metrics are collected on APPUiO Zones using Prometheus.

Common rules

Downsampling

Sampling interval for invoicing states the requirement to measure metrics at least every 30 seconds. The interval of interest for invoicing is 1 minute. For intervals where more than one sample is available, those samples will be aggregated using aggregation functions. In Prometheus lingo the <aggregation>_over_time() functions will be used applied to a time window of 1 minute.

Reported unit

In the Prometheus ecosystem, it is common to measure memory in base units (for example bytes). This would result in utterly long numbers. During the invoice generation, those units will be converted to a more suitable one.

Minimal invoiced amounts

Allocating compute and storage resources on a Kubernetes cluster binds some resources on the clusters control plane. To account for that overhead, a minimal amount will be invoiced even if the effective usage is lower.

Metric: Memory usage

The metrics exporter reports metrics on the level of a single container. As defined in Metrics scope for invoicing it will be invoiced on the level of a Pod. The corresponding metrics will be aggregated using the sum() function.

If a Pod gets deployed with a memory reservation, that reservation gets invoiced should the effective usage be lower. So the effective invoiced memory usage is the maximum of:

  • The Pods effective memory usage

  • The Pods memory reservation

  • 125 MB

The business model of VSHN defines, that this number is increased in steps of 125 MB rounded up.

ceil(max(effective usage, reservation, 125)/125) * 125

The corresponding metrics for this are container_memory_usage_bytes and container_spec_memory_reservation_limit_bytes (needs verification).

Aggregation method

Average

Reported unit

Megabyte (\$10^6\$)

Minium invoiced amount

125 MB

Metric: Usage of persistent storage

Persistent storage gets invoiced based on the requested amount of a PersistentVolumeClaim (allocated usage). The corresponding metric for this is kube_persistentvolumeclaim_resource_requests_storage_bytes.

Aggregation method

Max

Reported unit

Gigabyte (\$10^9\$)

Minimum invoiced amount

1 GB

Labels

The following labels must exist on collected metrics:

zone

Metrics are collected from several zones and invoiced in a single invoice. For the recipient of the invoice it must be obvious in which APPUiO Zone the usage accumulated.

pod

Metrics scope for invoicing defines that the cost will be reported on the level of Pods.

namespace

The same as with the zone, the recipient of the invoice should be able to tell in witch namespace the workload was/is deployed.

organization

This is required to link the metric to the entity the invoice will be sent to.