Scaling your resources up or down based on your infrastructure needs can be a cakewalk with auto-scaling. However, auto-scaling instances are unpredictable, and you may not be able to decide on a license plan that can include all the monitors you may add while scaling up. You may even end up buying too many licenses to include the monitors you keep adding. And what if you exceed your license limit while scaling up the number of resources? Here’s where Hourly Billing plays a key role in an auto-scaled environment.
You can purchase a license for your confirmed asset limit and enable Hourly Billing along with it. Whenever the purchased licenses are exhausted, Hourly Billing mode will kick in for the auto-scaled monitors. And the resource usage will be calculated based on hourly utilization, charging you for the resources used beyond the license limit.
How does Hourly Billing work?
Hourly Billing is only supported for certain monitor types. You can add other monitor types that do not come under Hourly Billing based on your license pack.
For instance, let’s assume your license limit is 10 monitors and you already have six non-Hourly Billing monitors. When you add 10 more monitors, four of those monitors will be included in the license plan, and the remaining six monitors will be charged based on Hourly Billing.
However, when you add a new monitor that doesn’t support Hourly Billing, it will be accommodated under your license limit, pushing a monitor under Hourly Billing out of the license limit. You will be billed for Hourly Billing each month that you use the service.
Hourly Billing supported monitor types
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APM Insight instances
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Servers
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VMware VM instances
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Azure Virtual Machines
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AWS services
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DynamoDB tables
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EC2 instances
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Lambda functions
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RDS instances
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SQS queues
Pricing
Basic monitor: $0.003 per hour
Advanced monitor: $0.028 per hour
Read our help documentation to learn how to enable Hourly Billing.
Please feel free to share your comments and suggestions in the comments section below.
Happy monitoring!