Glossary

Resource Consumption Service Terminology

Term	Definition
Abacus Integrator	The responsible for the correct functioning of the Abacus components.
Account	An abstraction that represents a single customer, owning multiple organizations.
Cloud Foundry Operator	The responsible for the day-to-day operation of Cloud Foundry.
Functions	A function is used by a Resource provider to combine measures into metrics.
Measures	The raw data that Resource Providers submit to Abacus.
Metering Plan	The Abacus Metering plan specifies how usage information sent by the Resource Providers should be processed - transformed, accumulated, and aggregated.
Metrics	While measures represent the raw data submitted to Abacus, metrics combine and derive value from that data.
Plan	Measures and metrics are grouped into a single entity called a plan. Plans provide Resource providers with a way to express the relationship between the measures and metrics.
Plan ID	The Abacus Plan ID, or just Plan ID, is an identifier used by Abacus to distinguish a concrete Service Plan to be billed.
Pricing Plan	The Abacus Pricing Plan specifies the amount of money that needs to be charged for a given usage, based on the Country of origin of the Resource Consumer.
Rating Plan	The Abacus Rating plan specifies how the final aggregated usage information should be rated.
Reporting micro-service	A pipeline component that provides usage reports and summaries.
Resource Consumer	The software of the customer that is making use of a specific instance of a service provided by a Resource Provider.
Resource ID	The Abacus Resource ID, or just Resource ID, is a GUID used by Abacus to distinguish the Resource Provider and concrete Service for which usage information is sent.
Resource Provider	The entity (team, organization) that provides a service (for example, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) for general consumption. Usually, the service is provided as part of the Cloud Platform offering.
Resource Token	A type of access token a Resource Provider is expected to present with the usage it submits for a resource.
Slack Window	The time interval that allows submission of late usage.
Submitted Usage	The raw data sent to Abacus. Also called Usage Records and Usage Documents.
System Token	A type of access token used by Abacus to authenticate and authorize the pipeline steps.
Time Windows	A range of time covering the boundaries of a specific time to a specific time dimension.
Usage Consumer	The usage consumer requests usage reports from Abacus.
Usage Document	The artifact that is sent by Resource Providers to Abacus to report the usage produced by a given Resource Consumer.
Usage Event Collector	A pipeline component that receives and stores usage events.