About Units
Units apply to tests run on Cloud or Enterprise Agents. This page outlines some basic facts about units and how they’re implemented on the ThousandEyes platform.
ThousandEyes uses a pre-pay subscription consumption model that includes both units and licensing. For units, the customer's subscription plan amount renews every month, based on the start date in the customer contract. Throughout the month, units are deducted from the customer's monthly plan amount based on the test type, interval, timeout, and the number and type of ThousandEyes agents running the test, as described in Calaculating Units. This monthly plan amount resets at the beginning of each new billing cycle.
Benefits of usage-based consumption:
Units allow tests to be priced fairly based on the value they bring. Since customers provide the hosting platform and manage Enterprise Agents themselves, running the same test on an Enterprise Agent costs less than running that same test on a Cloud Agent.
Usage-based test pricing allows the customer to change their test setup as their needs change, at any time.
Budgeting tips for usage:
Unit consumption is calculated and tracked on a monthly basis.
Customers commit to an annual contract with a specified number of units per month. This contractual agreement specifies the organization’s total usage cap.
Unused units do not rollover from month to month.
Planning usually involves setting a usage threshold slightly higher than your current usage, to allow for test changes or additions on an as-needed basis.
A user with the Organization Admin role can assign quotas to each account group within an organization as described in Setting Quotas.
Overages
An overage is the result of exceeding your monthly unit allowance. For the most part, customers have overages disabled, meaning they are prevented from using more units than their monthly allowance. For those customers who have overages enabled, the overage may or may not be billed at the end of the month, depending on the customer's plan.
If you are not sure whether overages are enabled or disabled for you or how it is billed, check your contract or speak to your ThousandEyes account team.
When overages are enabled, you are able to change the limit by which your organization is allowed to exceed its monthly allowance. You do this in Account Settings > Usage and Billing > Quotas. By default, overages are capped at 115% for customers who have overages enabled.
To change your cap, you simply type a new number into the value setting next to the toggle. For example, say you project that your organization will grow by 180% over the year, and you’d like your ThousandEyes unit usage to keep pace with that growth. You might, therefore, set your Organization Quota to 200% of plan to account for any underestimation of your growth. This gives you the flexibility to grow but still keeps a limit on usage so that you don’t overspend.
Alternatively, you could toggle off the Organization Quota: this action removes any limit whatsoever and results in the message “Overage may happen.”
Capacity Planning
For those customers who have overages disabled, usage-based consumption still allows you flexibility in your test deployment. In order to achieve this, it’s recommended that you build in a small over-consumption allowance so that you can easily add new tests or change test configurations in response to changing business requirements.
Sometimes, unexpected changes can put additional burdens on your networks and infrastructure, and the network team as well. A typical over-consumption allowance might be 5-10%, and will depend on your specific enterprise needs.
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