Hi, Hristo,

Have you tried the CF-Abacus release: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/cf-abacus

If not please do so and see if it matches your need. And after you do, let's have a discussion on what gaps exists with your use case.

Thanks,

dr.max
ibm cloud labs
silicon valley, ca

We want to integrate the metrics provided by Cloud Foundry with Abacus.

We plan to create a billing/metering integration layer that:
fetches the app usage events from CC
inserts runtime usage data to Abacus

The events should be processed to build usage data based on them. This is much like the idea outlined in Dr.Nic's blog. The integration layer can do this periodically.

AFAIK Abacus provides usage reports for the current month only and not for arbitrary period of time. This implies some restrictions to what we can report when the application is:
started and stopped several times in the month
started in the current month but not stopped at all
started in a previous month and not stopped

The first problem can be solved by iterating through the events and finding the respective start and end timestamps that have to be reported to Abacus.

The second issue might be solved by reporting small amounts of usage, stating from the last start event and continuing to report on every poll of the integration layer. For example we can report several usages:
start: 1438945112; end: 1438946000 (current time for the billing integration)
start: 1438946000 (previous reporting cycle); end: 1438947000

The third issue might be solved by finding the last start event and reporting in the same manner as with #2.
Reporting usage in small steps might require persistence so we can store the end time of the previous reporting. We might use in-memory cache and reach to Abacus as primary storage. If Abacus can accumulate usage reporting we can even get rid of the persistence and cache.

Is such integration in the scope of Abacus project?

Best Regards,
Hristo Iliev