Submitting Usage Data for an Account
When you've set up pricing for your Product Plans and attached these to an Account, you might want to generate some test Bills for the Account. To do this, you'll need to feed some sample usage data for the Account into m3ter before you generate any test Bills. You can do this directly from the Account page.
Tip: Submit Test Usage Data for a Meter? Alternatively, you can follow similar steps to those explained here to submit usage data for a specific Account from a Meter page. See Submitting Test Usage Data.
To submit usage data for an Account:
1. Select Accounts. The Accounts page opens.
2. Select the NAME text of the Account for which you want to submit usage data. The Account page opens with the Overview tab selected.
3. On the Account actions menu, select Account>Submit Usage. A Submit usage data dialog appears.
4. For Step 1 - Select a meter on the dialog, use the Meter drop-down list to select the Meter whose Data Fields were Target Fields for an Aggregation used for pricing a Plan you've attached to the Account.
5. Select Continue. The dialog adjusts to show Step 1 checked as completed and moves to Step 2 - Define measurements and send:
The default method to complete Step 2 is Simple:
A measurement UID is entered automatically. Note: this must be unique and immutable.
A Timestamp date/time is entered for the current date and time. You can adjust this and enter a date/time value that is in the past for your submission. This is useful, if you need to adjust billing on an Account retrospectively. For more details, see Adjusting Timestamp for Submitting Usage Data.
The Code strings for the Meter and Account are entered - these are required parameters for a Submit Measurements API call to the m3ter Ingest API.
Enter a Value for each of the Meter Data fields as required for the usage data submission. In this example, the selected Meter has a single MEASURE numeric Data Field:
Alternatively, you can switch to Advanced, where you can edit the raw JSON for the usage data submission:
Important! For JSON well-formedness, do not have a trailing comma after the last Data Field parameter entry. If you do, then your Submit usage call will be rejected as invalid.
6. Select Submit usage. If the submission succeeds, you will see a confirmation message that it was accepted at the bottom of the submit dialog:
7. If you want to send a second set of usage data for the Account using the same Meter, close the Submit usage data dialog and select Submit usage again. You will see that there is a new measurements UID inserted on the Submit usage data dialog.
Tip: Repeated Test Submissions? If you had simply selected Submit usage a second time, you would have submitted under the same measurement UID and, although an “accepted” message will be returned again, the system interprets this as the same data and ignores it.
8. Re-enter second set of measure values for the Meter Data Fields.
9. Select Submit usage again to submit a second set of usage data.
Tip: Account consumes several Products? If the Account for which you want to test Billing consumes more that one of your Products, you can repeat these steps for each of the Meters used as the basis for pricing each of the Product Plans attached to the Account.