What are Services?

In Exivity Services can be anything that corresponds to an SKU or sellable item from your Service Catalogue. It should relate to a consumption record (or multiple records) from your extracted data sources.

For example: with most public cloud providers, the provider defines the chargeable items that are shown on the end-of-month invoice. However, when working through a Managed Services Provider, a Cloud Services Provider, or a System Integrator, additional services can be sold on top of those. Potentially, you may want to apply an uplift to the rate or charge a fixed amount of money every month for a certain service. Different scenarios are possible here, it all depends on your business logic.

Terminology​

A service is a named item with associated rates and/or costs used to calculate a charge that appears on a report, where rates represent revenue and costs represent overheads.

When discussing services and their related charges several terms are required. Exivity uses the following terminology in this regard:

Term	Synonym/Abbreviation	Meaning
service definition	service	A template defining how service instances should be charged
service instance	instance	Consumption of a service, associated with a unique value such as a VM ID, a VM hostname, a resource ID or any other distinguishing field in the usage data
unit of consumption	unit	The consumption of 1 quantity of a service instance
charge interval	interval	The period of time that a unit of consumption is charged over (additional units of the same service instance consumed within the charge interval do not increase the resulting charge)
unit rate	rate	The charge associated with 1 unit of consumption of a service instance in the charge interval
COGS rate	cogs	(Short for Cost Of Goods Sold) The cost (overhead) to the provider of a service for providing 1 unit of consumption of that service per charge interval
charge		A generic term to indicate some money payable by the consumer of service instances to the provider of those instances