CYCLOPS Dashboard: Usage visualization, rate configuration & billing for OpenStack

The first version of the Rating, Charging and Billing Dashboard is now available on Github! The dashboard is targeted towards a cloud service provider and their client. It has different views for an end user and a cloud administrator. The dashboard interacts with the different micro services of Rating, Charging & Billing to get the relevant data and for storing the configuration settings.

Following are some of the salient features of the dashboard –

• OpenAM powered authentication and authorization.
• Association of OpenStack account with the dashboard account
• Separate view for an end user and a cloud administrator
• User rights management
• Visualization of resources consumed
• Enabling different rate policy for cloud resources
• Visualization of the generated rate of a resource
• Visualization of charge data generated for a user

Let’s have a look at the features in detail: 

Linking an IaaS/PaaS account to the dashboard

The first task for a new user in the dashboard: Associate an account from a cloud provider. This account will be the source for all usage data collection and bill generation later on.

In the Cloud Services menu, a user is presented a list of available cloud providers. After clicking on one of the enabled buttons, the user will be asked for his credentials for the cloud provider account.

Note that in the current version, only OpenStack is supported

Visualize resource usage

After successfully linking cloud provider accounts, the user can see his resource usage, the rates being charged for the cloud resources and calculated charge for the resource usage.

All the graphs are created dynamically, based on what meters an admin has selected for data collection.

Administration Features

Dashboard administrators have the ability to manage users and configure the different micro services.

Admins can promote other users to be admins or revoke rights from other admins

As one of the main features, administrators can select the meters that need be enabled for data collection. The selected data is forwarded to the UDR micro service for persistence.

The admin has the ability to specify the way a rate for a resources is calculated. In the above screenshot, the view contains a switch between a dynamic rating policy and static rating policy. For a static rating policy, the admin can specify the rate that needs to be used for a cloud resource. In case of a dynamic rate policy, the rate is determined by a rule engine, which is part of Rate & Charge microservice.

Upcoming Features

The dashboard is still in development and new features will be added in the coming months. The main upcoming features are the following:

• Billing:  Users will be able to view past and current bills and print PDFs with detailed cost composition
• Sensu Integration: The dashboard will show notifications / alerts from Sensu, for example to let administrators know when there is a problem with a microservice
• External Meters: Cloud providers will be able to add external meters for data collection
• Rules: In combination with a rule engine, it will be possible to define rating rules