Orb

Automate the usage metering from Orb to all cloud marketplaces.

Overview

If you’re currently dependent on Orb for your metering and billing services and are aiming to grow your presence in cloud marketplaces, Fours presents the perfect solution to bridge this transition. Through our no-code, fully automated integration, you can effortlessly measure usage within your existing Orb setup and allocate it to clients across various cloud marketplaces. This integration eliminates the necessity for migration or complex engineering work, ensuring a seamless and trouble-free process.

Create Integration

In your Fours Console Integration, you will see the Orb integration connection. Click the Connect button to create an integration with your Orb instance. This will open an dialog for you to input

• API Key: The Orb API key can be issued in the Orb’s console. Here is the auth guidance.
• Billing Mode: quantity, amount, or invoice. If it is quantity, Fours fetch & report the billable metrics by quantity. If it is amount, Fours fetch & report the billable metrics by amount/cost. If it is invoice, Fours reports each issued Orb invoice’s total to the cloud marketplace once. See Billing Mode for details.

Once the integration process is finished, you can proceed by clicking the VERIFY button. This action triggers the Fours service to test the connection to the APIs of your Orb instance. If everything is configured correctly, the integration status will be updated as VERIFIED.

Edit Integration

Editing an existing Orb integration is supported. Click the Edit button to open the dialog of editing Orb integration as shown below.

• Enable Auto Report Usage. You can choose to enable or disable the automatic usage report feature for Orb. Enabling this feature allows Fours to run a cron job once a day to retrieve the aggregated subscription usages, costs, or issued invoice totals from Orb and report them as UsageRecordGroups to the Fours metering API. On the other hand, disabling this feature means that no cron job will be scheduled for this purpose.

• Enable Auto Report Credit. Shown only when Billing Mode is amount and Auto Report Usage is enabled. When enabled, Fours nets out the prepaid Orb credits a buyer consumes. For each reporting window, Fours reads the credit Orb applied and subtracts it from the amount metered to the cloud marketplace.

• Billing Mode: quantity, amount, or invoice. If it is quantity, Fours fetch the billable metrics by quantity. If it is amount, Fours fetch the billable metrics by amount/cost. If it is invoice, Fours reports each issued Orb invoice’s total to the cloud marketplace once.

• Plans. All available price plans in your Orb instance. The source dimension keys with the price for each type of price plans can be found here.

• Billable Metrics. The full list of billable metrics fetched from Orb for all available Orb customers. It is auto fetched from Orb, not editable.

Delete Integration

The Orb integration can be deleted like all other integrations. Once the deletion is triggered, all integration info including the API Key will be deleted immediately & permanently from Fours. No time window or methods to recover.

Billing Mode

There are three billing modes available for Fours-Orb integration: quantity, amount, and invoice.

• quantity: Fours fetches the per-period usage quantities of each billable metric from the Buyer’s active Orb subscription and reports them to the mapped cloud marketplace dimensions. Only plans priced per unit or by matrix can be reported this way; for other pricing models, use amount. Before reporting a day, Fours checks its metrics against the buyer’s entitlement: each must match a dimension on it, directly or through dimension mapping, and an Oracle entitlement still under Fours’ 100-key limit accepts a new key too. A day with a metric the entitlement can’t take is held back and the buyer is listed as failed, naming the missing dimensions and the number of days held back; the buyer’s other days are still reported.
• amount: Fours fetches the per-period subscription costs from Orb and reports them on the single source dimension key orb (unit price $1). They go to whichever of the buyer’s entitlements carries orb: either the entitlement has a dimension keyed or named orb, or — with Enable Dimension Mapping turned on for that marketplace in Metering Dimension Conversion — it has the dimension orb is mapped to. If none of them does, an Oracle entitlement still under Fours’ limit of 100 usage keys is used instead: Fours registers orb on it with the first report (see Usage keys are open). If no entitlement qualifies, or more than one does, that buyer’s usage is not reported for the run. Other buyers’ usage still is, and the run then ends as failed so the skipped buyer is not mistaken for a successful report; the run’s details name the buyer and what to fix (see Troubleshoot a failed sync).
• invoice: Fours fetches each issued Orb invoice’s total and reports them on the single source dimension key orb. See Invoice Mode below.

The following table details how to configure the source dimension keys in metering dimension conversion for the quantity and amount modes.

Invoice Mode

In invoice mode, Fours reports issued Orb invoice totals.

During each sync run, Fours fetches the invoices of the connected Orb Customers from the last two calendar months and handles each invoice by its status:

• Issued: The invoice’s total amount is reported to the cloud marketplace exactly once. After reporting, Fours stamps the Orb invoice with metadata suger_usage_record_group_id.
• Void: If a voided invoice was previously reported, Fours automatically credits the reported amount back to the buyer’s entitlement.
• Draft / Paid / Synced: Skipped.

Each issued invoice is reported to one of the buyer’s metering entitlements — with several, the one whose term contains the end of the invoice’s service period. That entitlement must be able to take the orb amount, as in amount mode: a dimension keyed or named orb, the dimension orb is mapped to, or, on Oracle, room for a new usage key. If it can’t, the invoice is not reported and the buyer is listed as failed, naming that entitlement.

Connect Orb Customer

To enable Fours to fetch and report the billable metrics of Orb Customers to the appropriate entitlements in Cloud Marketplace, you need to connect the Buyer in Fours with the corresponding Customer in Orb. Simply click the Edit button in the Buyer and add the corresponding Orb Customer ID. This setup only needs to be done once; afterward, Fours’ service will automatically retrieve the latest billable metrics and report them to the correct Cloud Marketplace entitlements.

Troubleshoot a failed sync

Fours reports each buyer separately, so one buyer’s problem doesn’t stop the others, but any buyer that can’t be reported makes the run end as failed. To see which buyers and why, open Operations from the Orb card’s ⋯ menu in Settings → Integrations and click the failed run’s View details icon. The reason reads like Orb usage wasn’t reported for 2 of 40 buyers. Open “Show what failed” to see what to fix for each. Expand Show what failed for one line per buyer: the buyer’s ID, then what went wrong and what to do. The list holds the first 100 buyers; if more failed, fix those and sync again to see the rest.