Prototype: Keep Track of those BTP Credits

[Willem_Pardaens]

Update: a new version was released in June 2024, read more here.

Ever wondered where your CPEA Credits went? Or where they will be spent on in the near future? Which project is consuming what and which sub account is silently munching those credits away?

An often-ignored, yet very interesting service is the SAP Usage Data Management Service for SAP BTP which can provide you with all this insight. It tells you which service is used in which sub account, what its consumption is and how many credits you are paying for it. A wealth of information that, once neatly organized, can help you in monitoring your global account better, keeping track of your spending and identifying areas where money is spent with no real business return. And who doesn't like cost savings :-)? Moreover, coupled with a forecasting and alerting mechanism, it could identify anomalies and spikes in consumption which you rather deal with instantly instead of keeping that as a surprise for the monthly bill!

Ideations about this scenario gave rise to a prototype where we clubbed together a few BTP services:

• Usage Data Management service: for all the great insights mentioned above;
• Alert Notification service: to inform and alert users about spikes and anomalies;
• Job Scheduling service: to regularly fetch new data points;
• SAP Build Work Zone: to create and present a nice user interface on top of it;
• Cloud Application Programming model: as the brains and glue for all the above.

Baptized with the name "BTP Resource Consumption monitor", the prototype is ready for testing and end-user feedback. It is made available as open source, and as such does not come with SAP Support, yet any feedback to improve the tool is most welcome.

Example of the consumption dashboard per service.

Main benefits this application will provide you with:

• Keep track of your credit consumption and compare it to previous months
• Analyze your consumption on global account, directory, sub account or datacenter level 
• Forecast your consumption per individual service, or aggregated for the account
• Receive alerts via email when consumption or forecasts increase above set thresholds

Ready to try it out for your own CPEA account? You can find the project files and installation documentation in the following SAP-Samples repository: https://github.com/SAP-samples/btp-resource-consumption-monitor