Measuring and Monitoring Customer Usage in CIC

You can measure and monitor how customers use CIC in order to help them manage their usage, make informed decisions about how they use CIC, and make future plans for their business ecosystem and partnering with Cleo.

Customer usage is defined in terms of connections and transactions.

Connections

Connections are named and specific instances of a connector to and from an application, technology device, or business partner. Connectors include protocol endpoints, like AS2 and FTP, and application connectors, like NetSuite and Shopify.

For the purpose of measuring usage, each unique set of credentials used for a given protocol is considered a separate connection and each reference to an application instance is also considered a separate connection.

Transactions

Transactions have a 1-1 relationship with Messages in CIC. That is, each message tile in the CIC Cockpit is a transaction.

Note: For a transaction to be counted on the Usage page, it must first be displayable on the Messages page.

For the purposes of measuring usage, EDI transactions are treated slightly differently than non-EDI transactions.

EDI transactions

For EDI document types, each message is associated with a particular segment. For example:

For X12, messages are associated with an ST-SE segment
For EDIFACT, messages are associated with UNH-UNT segments.
For TRADACOMS messages are associated with MHD/MTR segments.

Note: X12 997s are not accounted for as chargeable annual transactions.

Certain EDI document types are displayed in CIC Cockpit by default. See EDI Document Types supported in CCP. CIC must be configured to display other document types in the Cockpit. See Getting Data from the CIC Studio to the CIC Cockpit: An Overview

Non-EDI transactions

For non-EDI formats, like flat files, XML, CSV, JSON, etc., discrete business entities are treated as transactions. Examples of transactions could be an Order or an Invoice, an employee’s weekly time card, shipment status, and so on.

Non-EDI document types are not displayed in CIC Cockpit by default. CIC must be configured to display non-EDI data in the Cockpit. See Getting Data from the CIC Studio to the CIC Cockpit: An Overview

About the Usage Page

The Usage page displays a list of CIC cloud customers with Connection and Transaction information for each.

Note: A customer's usage information cannot be calculated if they do not plan start and end dates and transaction and connection allowances set.

The Usage page provides two graphs and a table of data.

Bar graph	Each bar represents the number of customers that fall into the range of percentage of daily average usage for transactions.
Donut graph	Represents all customers. Colors represent the range of percentage of daily usage for transactions. That is, what portion of all customers fall into which percentage range of daily average usage for transactions.
Main table	The main table of data on the page shows a list of all CIC customers. For each customer, you can see plan end date, transaction metrics, and connection metrics. This data can be used to analyze customer resource usage and to help guide the customer when making decisions about usage, buying more resources, etc. See Understanding and Applying Connection and Transaction Metrics. You can click a customer name to display usage information about that customer. See Viewing Usage and Settings for a Single Customer.

Note: Depending on your Role, you might see a difference between the number of transactions counted on the Usage page and the number of tiles displayed on the Messages page. If your role is Admin, you see the same number of transactions on both pages. If your role is Normal, it means you might have access to only some partners and, therefore, you might see fewer tiles on the Messages page than transactions on the Usage page.

Filtering and Downloading Usage Data

You can filter the list by customer name. You can sort the table by any of the column headings. You can download a csv file containing the data displayed in the table. If you filter the table by customer name, you download only that data. If you sort the table, the data appears in that order when you open the downloaded file.

Viewing Usage and Settings for a Single Customer

From the Usage page, you can drill down into information for a single customer. Click a customer name to display usage information for that customer.

You can click the Download button to download usage data for this customer to a .csv file.

You can click the Settings button to set the plan start and end dates, and connection and transaction allowances.

Specify values in each of the fields and click Update to save your changes. These changes will be reflected on the Usage page the next time the page is refreshed.

Understanding and Applying Connection and Transaction Metrics

The Usage page shows metrics for connections and transactions on a per-customer basis.
The following tables describe each of the columns on the Usage page and give some examples of how you can apply this information to a customer’s situation to help them make informed business decisions.

Connections
Field/Column	Description	Application
Used	The number of connections made by the customer so far in the plan year.	Understand how busy the customer is and possibly how broad their ecosystem is. Comparing the number of connections used to the number of customer’s trading partners might lead to some optimization for the customer vis-a-vis connections. Can be used to decide how closely to monitor this customer’s usage.
Allowance	The number of connections the customer bought for the current plan year.	Understand what the customer bought and can expect to receive over the course of the plan year.
Allowance Used	Percentage of allowance of connections made to date in the plan year.	Understand how the customer is progressing through their allowance this plan year. Can be used to help the customer make decisions about their usage, for example, whether to buy more connections, curtail usage, or make some operational changes to make their usage fall more in line with their expectations. Can be used to decide how closely to monitor this customer’s usage.

Transactions
Field/Column	Description	Application
Used	The number of transactions carried out so far in the plan year.	Understand General usage. How many transactions the customer has carried out without respect to any other measure.
Annual Allowance	The number of transactions the customer bought for the plan year.	Understand what the customer bought and can expect to receive for the plan year.
Annual Allowance Used	The percentage of annual allowance used to date in the current plan year.	How quickly the customer is using up their allowance of transactions; how busy they are compared to predictions (i.e., how many transactions they decided they should buy for the year). Can help predict when they will exceed annual allowance. Can be used to help the customer make decisions about their usage, for example, whether to buy more transactions, curtail usage, or make some operational changes to make their usage fall more in line with their expectations. Can be used to decide how closely to monitor this customer’s usage.
Daily Average Usage	The Annual Allowance in terms of the number of days elapsed in the plan year.	Understand how quickly the customer is using up their allowance of transactions as it relates to days elapsed in the plan year. Provides a way to understand how quickly the customer is consuming their resources. Can be used to project when they will exceed their allowance. Can be used to decide how closely to monitor this customer’s usage.

Connections