Archived - Displaying and Alerting for Unit Consumption

This article describes the process of sending notifications to customers when their used or projected units are appraoching their plan limits. However, this function is disabled for most customers. The article is archived to reduce confusion for those customers who do not receive these notifications, but retained in archive for those who do.

ThousandEyes customers who use Cloud or Enterprise Agents have a monthly allotment of units to allocate for tests assigned to those agents. The number of units per month is specified in your ThousandEyes customer contract. Customers can be kept up to date on current and projected future usage through the Usage tab of the Account Settings page. Additionally, the ThousandEyes platform automatically warns the user through the Notifications menu of the app, as well as emailing the warnings to an organization's billing contact.

• You can keep up to date on current and projected future usage through the Usage tab of the Account Settings page.

• You can set usage quotas by account group as described in Setting Quotas

• Additionally, the ThousandEyes platform automatically warns the user through the Notifications menu of the app, as well as emailing the warnings to an organization's billing contact.

Only users who have been assigned a role with the View billing permission can view the Billing tab. Only users who have been assigned a role with the View organization usage permission can view the Usage tab.

Information on the formula to calculate the units used by a given configuration of a test can be found in Calculating Units.

Current and Estimated Monthly Consumption

The Usage tab displays the number of units consumed to date in your monthly billing cycle. Each customer’s billing cycle is based on the customer’s contract date. Additionally, in order to maximize your use of the platform without incurring additional charges or hitting usage limits, ThousandEyes provides a projection of the units which will be used by the end of your billing cycle, based on your unit consumption to date, the rate you are currently using units, and the time remaining in the monthly billing cycle.

In mathematical terms, the projected units, , are calculated by adding the amount of units consumed since the beginning of the cycle,, to the units per month cost of the currently configured tests,, multiplied by the fraction of the rounds remaining in the month divided by total rounds in the month:

Information on the number of units consumed is updated every six hours.

Usage Tab Panels

The top panel of the Account Settings > Usage tab displays the date range of your billing cycle. Unit usage is displayed as the actual units used relative to your total monthly unit allotment. Included there is the projection of the units which will be used at the end of the current monthly billing cycle, per the above formula.

In the above example, as of the current date, this organization has used 50% of its total unit monthly allotment for the period April 1st to May 1st (a 30-day billing cycle). At the current rate of unit usage, the organization is projected to use 83% by the end of the billing cycle.

The second panel of the Usage tab contains two tabs: Cloud Unit Breakdown and Enterprise Agents Breakdown. The former displays current usage breakdowns by account group, test type, and test, and optionally breakdowns of the full month's estimated usage.

The Enterprise Agent Breakdown tab shows usage of Enterprise Agents by account group:

Usage Alerts

When projected/actual usage by an organization exceeds certain levels, an email is sent to the organization's billing contact. In addition, the email goes to all users with the Organization Admin role.

These levels are:

• Estimated usage is greater than 100%

• Actual usage exceeds 90% AND the estimated usage is greater than 100%

• Actual usage exceeds 100%

The billing contact Email field can only accommodate a single email address. To distribute billing contact emails from ThousandEyes to multiple recipients within your organization who do not already have the Organization Admin role, we recommend creating a distribution list within your organization, and entering the distribution list's email address in the Email field of the billing contact information.

You will need to ensure that senders outside your organization have permission to send email to the distribution list.

Using the metrics on the Usage tab, admins can locate the largest sources of unit consumption. If your projected or actual use exceeds 100%, you can try one of the following options:

• Reduce the number of tests, by disabling some tests.

• Investigate tests that have lower unit costs that can still meet your testing requirements, or find a way to use test layering to eliminate redundancy among your tests.

• Reduce the number of cloud or enterprise agents running the tests.

• Switch some tests to use enterprise agents instead of cloud agents, since enterprise agents consume only half as many units.

If you determine that all the tests are necessary, a final option would be to increase your usage limits as specified in the customer contract. Contact your ThousandEyes account team for assistance.

These usage alerts are based on a usage snapshot, not on the latest timeframe. If you receive a notification of estimated usage exceeding 100%, you can check the unit projection in Account Settings > Usage and Billing > Billing, to confirm the latest 'estimated usage'. Estimated usage may have changed if any test configurations have been updated since the previous snapshot.

Usage alerts are cleared from the notification queue at the end of the billing cycle.