Meter Lifecycle

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 meters in Draft mode to product items and create pricing plans, once you activate the Pricing Plan, it will also activate any Draft meters that are associated. In other words, once the plan is activated, any Draft meters will be set to Active automatically and will be locked to further changes.

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.

The Event Logs view provides end-to-end visibility to each meter event from the moment of ingestion through to persistence on an invoice. Each meter event is listed in order of ingestion; each event is clickable and will expand into a drawer view showing event details.

Event details include the meter name, value, and timestamp of ingestion. The JSON payload as it was ingested is shown, as well as the associated pricing plan and which invoice the event is billed on.