Throughput Based Billing

Last updated on 2019-07-26 00:41:14

In many scenarios, customers may want to operate their WAF infrastructure from the viewpoint of throughput required to process traffic for one or more applications. By using this approach, one can eliminate the need for unit/instance based licensing and provide flexibility in deployments, for example in autoscaling setups.

Throughput based billing is a licensing mechanism by which the customer can purchase licenses based on required throughput, in units of Gbps. This license is enabled on WCC. Here, the number of WAFs required to process the throughput does not play a role.

Throughput Licensing helps to record and track the throughput consumption of every WAF (9.2.1 and above) connected to the WCC unit. Each WAF connected to WCC can send its throughput consumption at every 5 minute interval.

Throughput Reports

The throughput reports are available under REPORTS > WAF Throughput.

They are available for the WCC admin in the "Admin" view and for account admins in the "Account" view.

Note that by default, filters are applied to the account logged-in for the Account view. However, each report comes with a set of predefined filters and an option to set the custom date range filter.

Three types of reports can be generated:

Deployment Throughput
Peak Throughput
Average Hourly Peak Throughput

Viewing Graphs

To know how the data is aggregated and displayed in reports, follow the grouping logic mentioned below.

Depending on the date filter-range selection, the grouping logic for the average bit rate calculation is as follows,

Deployment Throughput Graph

For ‘last day’ & ‘last 2 days’ filter (date range < 7 days), the grouping of data points is done at a 15 minute interval.
For ‘Last Week’ and ‘Last 2 Weeks’ (date range >= 7 days and < 30 days), the grouping is done at every 1 hour interval.
For ‘Last Month’, ‘Last 3 Months’ & ‘Last 6 Months’ (date range > 30 days), the grouping is done at every 12 hour intervals.

Peak Throughput Graph

The grouping of data is always done at every 1 hour interval

Average Hourly Throughput Graph

The grouping of data is always done at every 1 day interval. You can also click the Export as CSV button to verify these intervals. The first column in the exported file displays the grouping time.

The Exported CSV file will always show the time in UTC.
The timestamps of the graphs are displayed based on the logged-in user's timezone settings.

Troubleshooting Steps

Problem Statement

The data for the WAF is not reflecting in the graph.

Solution

Check if the WAF is connected to WCC.
In case of long network outages, WAF saves its past throughput consumption data and sends it to WCC only when the connectivity is recovered.