In this session you will learn about Ceilometer and the challenges and solution faced in integrating customer billing. Ceilometer is a telemetry system and by itself mostly provides collection of and basic access to raw usage data. To interface with a 3rd party billing system additional work is required. Ceilometer gathers data from various sources and levels (such as storage, compute, networking or even hardware related events), does some basic processing, stores it in a database and provides access to it via an API. All this data is referenced to a project but this is where the scope of Ceilometer stops. For a Billing system to act, it must have a concept of daily billable records, products/services, accounts and subscriptions, meaning who and what I should bill and for what amounts.
We will present the need for billing, the design of a framework that is intended to bridge the current Openstack gap and enable pluggable external billing systems.