Setting Quotas
What Quotas Are
Quotas are used to ensure that unit consumption, either at the organization or the account group level, does not exceed a defined cap or threshold set per billing cycle (cycles are a month long). If the quota is exceeded, you will not be able to set up new scheduled tests, and/or some scheduled tests may be automatically disabled in order to stop unit consumption.
Quotas currently can be set for Cloud and Enterprise Agent tests only. They cannot be set for Device Agent tests.
For most customers, the ability to change the organization quota is disabled. This is because most customers cannot exceed their monthly usage allowance. For this reason, the remainder of this article will focus on setting account group quotas. For those customers who have overages enabled, see Overages for how to set and manage the organization quota.
Note: overages are only applicable to organization quotas; overages are never applicable to account group quotas. This is because account group quotas are specifically intended to create limits to how much a single account group can consume to ensure others have some amount of usage available.
Who Can Set Quotas
Users with the Edit organization and account group quotas permission (usually Organization Admins only), can set and change quotas at Account Settings > Usage and Billing > Quotas. Only users with this permission have the Quotas page viewable on the platform.
Why Set Quotas
Different organizations will want to set account group quotas for different reasons. Here are a sampling of reasons to set account group quotas.
Unit Quotas Use Cases
Use case #1: I don't want a single account group consuming all my units unexpectedly.
Configure quota settings for all your account groups. This way none of your account groups will be able to consume all available units, preventing (unintended) increased unit usage in one account group from adversely affecting your other account groups.
Use case #2: My users are located all over the world. I want to allocate units to users based on regions.
Create one account group per region. Then configure unit quotas for each region.
Use case #3: I want to keep my operations team uncapped while limiting units for all other account groups.
If you have enabled quotas for all your account groups, you can always disable unit quota allocation for a particular account group while leaving other account groups capped.
Use case #4: I don't know how many units my new account groups will consume, but I don't want them to consume all available units.
Quotas allocated to your account groups can add up to more than 100% of available units. Configure your new account group(s) with quota allocations below 100% for each individual account group. This enables an early warning about individual account group consuming more units than expected while not immediately affecting your other account groups.
Use case #5: I've set up account group quotas, the setup is working as expected. How can I make sure my quotas configuration is unchanged?
Every ThousandEyes user in your account with the Can assign and edit quota permission will be able to adjust quotas. You will need to remove this permission (only available to Organization Admins by default) from all users unauthorized to perform quota allocation changes. You will need to communicate your requirement to other ThousandEyes administrators in your organization. If unexpected changes do happen, you can always inspect the Activity Log for further details.
How to Set Quotas
On the Quotas page, the top section shows a summary of your organization’s plan and usage information, which is there to help guide you through your allocation exercise. The second section lists all the account groups in your organization, along with the information and management tools that will enable you to set your account group quotas. Each element and its use is described below.
Components of the Quotas tab
Plan: Total units allocated to your organization per billing cycle.
Organization Current Usage Rate: Your organization’s current usage so far this billing cycle. Shown in terms of % of Plan used and number of Units consumed.
Organization Quota: Total units a customer may use per billing cycle. For most customers, the default value is their monthly plan amount, which they cannot change (toggle and value field are disabled). For customers who have overages enabled, the toggle off setting means their usage is uncapped. Should they wish to set a specific amount of usage, they can toggle the setting on and set the value to their desired amount. See Overages for more information about overages.
Unallocated Usage: Available percentage and number of monthly units not allocated to any account group. This is calculated by adding up the units reserved for account groups that have quotas set, and the current usage by all of the account groups that do not have quotas set, and subtracting this number from the total plan units.
Account Group: This column contains names of account groups defined in the organization.
Current Usage Rate: Current usage amount (shown in terms of % of Plan used and number of Units consumed) per account group for this billing cycle.
Note: Account group quotas cannot be set lower than the currently consumed units for the billing period.
Quota toggle: Enable or disable a fixed quota of units for an account group. When disabled, an account group can use any amount of units up to the plan amount.
Slider to configure a value for the Usage Selector field.
Usage Selector: The number of Units or % of Plan allocated to an account group per billing cycle.
Once you have finished configuring quotas, click Save Changes for the changes to take effect.
How units accrue to account group quotas
Agents and tests can be shared between account groups. This removes the need to duplicate resources. However, units accrue to different account groups depending on the agents used in the tests. For tests running on Cloud Agents, units are counted against the quota of the account group that created (owns) the test. For tests running on Enterprise Agents, units are counted against the quota of the account group that created (owns) the Enterprise Agent, not the account group that owns the test. This is because the account group token used to connect an Enterprise Agent to the ThousandEyes platform is unique per account group. For more information about how to share account group resources, see Sharing Resources Between Account Groups.
Related Information
Best Practices for Implementing Account Groups explains how best to set up account groups for your particular kind of organization.
Displaying and Alerting for Unit Consumption explains how to get notified when your usage exceeds certain thresholds.
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