Reviewing Aggregation Options

You can use Aggregations to convert the usage data collected by your Meters into numerical measures. You can then use these Aggregations to price your product Plans and apply usage-based pricing to your products and services. You might also want to aggregate raw data measures for other purposes, such as to feed into analytical or business performance tools. This topic explains the difference between Product and Global Aggregations and the configuration options available for Aggregations.

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Product vs. Global Aggregations

You can create Product Aggregations, which belong to a specific Product, or Global Aggregations, which are not tied to a specific Product:

• If you create an Aggregation that targets a Product-specific Meter, the Aggregation is tied to the same Product and can only be used to price Plans created for that Product. See Creating Product Aggregations.
• If you create an Aggregation that targets a Global Meter, the Aggregation also becomes Global and can be used to price Plans created for any Product. See Creating Global Aggregations.
• If you create an Aggregation that targets a Product-specific Meter, the Aggregation is Product-specific also for the Product. If you then switch the target Meter to be a Global Meter, the Aggregation then becomes Global also. See Product Meters vs. Global Meters.

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Configuring Aggregations

When you create an Aggregation and have entered a Name and Code you must define several key attributes to ensure the resultant Aggregation value precisely suits your pricing or other requirements:

• Meter. Each Aggregation is a child of a Meter, so you must first select the Meter you want to use as the source of raw usage data for your Aggregation.
• Target Field. When you select a Meter, you can then select a Data Field or Derived Field on the Meter as the basis for your Aggregation.
• Aggregation. This defines the method by which a numerical measurement is determined on the basis of the usage data collected by the Target Field. The options for how the Aggregation gives a unit value based on the Target Field depends on the Category configured for the selected Target Field:
  • Sum. Adds the values. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
  • Minimum. Uses the minimum value. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
  • Maximum. Uses the maximum value. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
  • Count. Counts the number of values. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
  • Latest. Uses the most recent value. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
    • Notes:
      • This is based on the timestamp - ts - value of usage data measurement submissions.
      • If you are using the Latest aggregation method, please ensure distinct ts values are used for your usage data measurements.
  • Mean. Uses the arithmetic mean of the values. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
  • Custom SQL. Allows you to run an SQL query against the measurements table to define a pricing metric. Can be applied to a Measure, Income, or Cost Target Field.
  • Unique. Uses unique values and returns a count of the number of unique values. Can be applied to a Metadata Target Field:
    • For example, if the data set collected by a Metadata field is [5,6,7,8,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,3,2], this function returns a count of 8 for the distinct unique values found in the data set - 5,6,7,8,9,4,3,2.
• Unit. The Unit you enter here is a label that will be used for billing to indicate to your customers what they are being charged for. For example, suppose you charge your end customers based on a measure of the volume of data streamed over time, such as kilobytes per second. You can enter KiBy/s as the unit for billing purposes. 
• Rounding. Specifies how you want m3ter to deal with non-integer, that is fractional number, Aggregation values. For example, suppose your Product charges end customers on the basis of the number of megabytes (MB) of storage they’ve used in any given billing period. If the value of the Aggregation you’ve used to price the Product Plan amounts to 73.2 MB for a billing period, do you want to round up the fractional value to 74 MB and charge them for that amount, round it down to 73 MB, or apply no rounding for the Bill calculation and charge them for the exact 73.2 MB Aggregated usage value? Four options:
  • None. Default.
  • Down
  • Up
  • Nearest. Rounds up to the nearest half: 5.1 is rounded to 5; 5.5 is rounded to 6.
    • Note that the Rounding setting is also used in conjunction with the Quantity per unit setting. Rounds the number of units after the Quantity per unit has been applied - see next bullet point.
• Quantity per unit. Defines how much of a quantity equates to 1 unit to be used when setting the price per unit for billing purposes. For example, suppose you are charging in kilobytes per second (KiBy/s) and want to charge $0.25 per 500 KiBy/s. When you come to price a Plan using the Aggregation, you can configure the price per unit to be $0.25 and enter 500 here for Quantity per unit.
  • Note that if you set Quantity per unit to a value other than one, you would typically set Rounding to Up. In this example, suppose your customer on average used 48,900 KiBy/s during the billing period, the billing charge would then be 48,900 / 500 = 97.8 rounded up to 98 * 0.25 = $2.45.

• Default Value. Optional field - enter a default value to be used for the Aggregation if no usage-data is available from the selected Meter Target field. Set to 0, if you expect to reference the Aggregation in a Compound Aggregation. This ensures that any null values are passed in correctly to the Compound Aggregation calculation with a value = 0.

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Segmented Aggregations

If you’ve set up non-numeric fields on the selected target Meter, you can configure a segmented Aggregation using the Segments panel. See Segmented Aggregations.

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Custom Fields

You can define Custom Fields when creating an Aggregation or edit the Aggregation at a later date to do this. Any Custom Fields you create for an Aggregation override those you’ve created for Aggregations at the Organizational level. We strongly recommend reviewing Working with Custom Fields before you create and use Custom Fields.