Exporting your usage data for continual insights

Enabling your account to export usage data

Before you can enable your account to export usage data, you need to have Administrator or editor role on the Billing account management service. For more information, see IAM access.

When you enable your account to export usage data, the COS bucket can collect data from as far back as a year. So, if its June 2024, you can only view usage as early as June 2023, but you'll always be able to view data from that far back. Meaning that if you enabled this feature in June 2023, and it is now June 2024, you can view usage data from June 2022 to June 2024.

To enable your account to export usage data, use the following steps:

1. From the IBM Cloud console, go to Manage > Billing and usage, and select Settings.
2. Click Connect.
3. Select a Cloud Object Storage instance and Bucket. By selecting these, you are choosing which bucket will store your usage reports.
   1. Optional: If you don't want to select an existing instance, you can click Select an instance > Create new.
   2. Optional: You can select a bucket or create a new bucket by clicking Create new bucket in the Bucket dropdown. For more information about buckets, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Object Storage. After you create your bucket
4. For service to service authorizations, click Authorize. For the required access, select Object Writer and Content Reader. Click Review and then Assign.
5. Click Connect after you review your folder details.

If you convert your account to an enterprise account, you need to follow these steps again to enable the enterprise account to export usage data. You can keep this feature on your original account or you can remove it by disconnecting your account from sharing usage.

Enabling your account to export usage data by using Terraform

Before you can attach enable your account to export usage data by using Terraform, make sure that you have completed the following:

• Install the Terraform CLI and configure the IBM Cloud Provider plug-in for Terraform. For more information, see the tutorial for Getting started with Terraform on IBM Cloud®. The plug-in abstracts the IBM Cloud APIs that are used to complete this task.
• Create a Terraform configuration file that is named main.tf. In this file, you define resources by using HashiCorp Configuration Language. For more information, see the Terraform documentation.

To enable your account to export usage data, you need to authorize a policy between two instances and provision billing_report_snaptshot for a resource instance. For more information, see the terraform documentation for ibm_billing_report_snapshot. Use the following steps to create an authorization policy and provision billing_report_snaptshot for a resource instance by using Terraform:

Credentials need to be provided by setting the environment variable IC_API_KEY that corresponds to the API key of the respective account to run the billing snapshot configuration. For more information, see IBM Cloud Provider terraform documentation.

1. The following example creates an authorization policy between two specific instances.

   provider "ibm" {
   }
   resource "ibm_iam_authorization_policy" "policy" {
   source_service_name         = "billing"
   target_service_name         = "cloud-object-storage"
   target_resource_instance_id = var.cos_instance_id
   roles                       = ["Object Writer", "Content Reader"]
   }
   

2. The following example provisions billing_report_snaptshot for a resource instance.

      provider "ibm" {
   }
   resource "ibm_billing_report_snapshot" "billing_report_snapshot_instance" {
   interval = var.billing_report_snapshot_interval
   versioning = var.billing_report_snapshot_versioning
   report_types = var.billing_report_snapshot_report_types
   cos_reports_folder = var.billing_report_snapshot_cos_reports_folder
   cos_bucket = var.billing_report_snapshot_cos_bucket
   cos_location = var.billing_report_snapshot_cos_location
   depends_on = [ ibm_iam_authorization_policy.policy ]
   }
   

3. After you finish building your configuration file, initialize the Terraform CLI. For more information, see Initializing Working Directories.

   terraform init
   

4. Provision the resources from the main.tf file. For more information, see Provisioning Infrastructure with Terraform.

   1. Run terraform plan to generate a Terraform execution plan to preview the proposed actions.

      terraform plan
      

   2. Run terraform apply to create the resources that are defined in the plan.

      terraform apply
      

If a service-to-service authentication already exists, the depends_on constraint can be removed for creation of billing_report_snapshot_instance.

Disconnecting your account from sharing usage

If you've set up your account to export usage data, you can disconnect your chosen bucket so that you are no longer exporting data.

To disconnect, use the following steps:

1. From the IBM Cloud console, go to Manage > Billing and usage, and select Settings.
2. Click Disconnect.
3. Enter the name of your bucket.
4. Click Disconnect.