Meter Life Cycle

Amberflo provides complete life cycle management for meters as a core design principle of the platform. As a best practice, users should meter exhaustively and the platform is built to enable this seamless experimentation and iteration. There is no additional charge for the number of meters, meter types, or dimensions used, only for the total number of meter events ingested.

All meters created, regardless of status, are shown by default from the Meters view. Meter status is indicated in the Status column of the table and meters can be filtered by their status by toggling between the buttons for All, Active, Draft, and Deprecated. These buttons and the Status column are shown in the screenshot below:

When a meter is created, it is set in Draft mode. This allows the user to make any changes or edits to the meter definition such as the meter name, connected API, aggregation rule, or dimension structure. You can ingest sample meters to those in draft mode to verify that the payload and mapping are all correct.

While you still can connect draft meters to product items and create active pricing plans, it is recommended as a best practice to change a meter’s status from draft to active once it is finalized and ready to be used for pricing and billing.

Active meters are locked to further changes or edits and should only be used for finalized meters that are used in production for pricing and billing. None of the meter traits can be modified at this point. Once a meter is being used for pricing and billing, it should not be possible to make changes to the meter, otherwise this could cause inconsistencies or errors mid-billing cycle.

If you need to make changes to an active meter, you must first deprecate it and then recreate the meter with any needed changes. Deprecated meters are deactivated and will no longer be connected to product items or used to generate metered invoices. These meters are still visible in Amberflo and the associated meter data is still accessible as needed.