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MetriWorks Signature Example Usage Scenario
Measuring Usage for a Tax Calculation Web Service |
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The following screen shots show Signature measuring usage for a subscription-based web service that calculates sales tax amounts for its customers. With Internet sales tax exemptions rapidly drawing to a close, such sales tax services are going to be critical for all sales conducted online. By implementing a sales tax calculator as a web service, this company has taken the headache away from online merchants having to maintain their own sales tax infrastructures as well as providing an extremely cost-effective delivery mechanism.
The Web Service: The GetTax web service is shown below. The calling application must provide a valid State, City, Zip combination as well as a UserId identifying the user of the service, an optional product code, and of course the amount of the transaction. Also, as a subscription-based service, an encrypted authorization code is sent with each request to ensure the calling application is authorized to make the request. A company subscribing to this web service may build any number of web sites or rich client applications that all leverage this same service for sales tax calculation. In order to properly bill and recognize revenues on a subscriber basis, the web service provider must be able to measure the usage of this service across all clients.
Configuring Signature Manager: Here we see the Signature Manager being used to configure the GetTax web service for usage indexing. The web service Administrator has browsed to the service method GetTaxAmount. In this case the Administrator has chosen to build indexes for the State, City, Zip, UserId, ProductCode, and Amount parameters. She has chosen not to perform reporting keyed on AuthCode or the return value. Note that if the AuthCode were considered to be a particularly sensitive piece of data, an exception could be set up that would completely remove that data from the logging process. Once the Administrator has configured the service for logging and indexing, she saves the configuration and Signature immediately begins logging and indexing all web service call data.
Viewing Usage in Signature Viewer: Once configured, the Signature Viewer allows a view of usage as it occurs. The figure below shows the number of times a UserId parameter was passed to the tax web service for the week of May 9-15. Note that since this is a required field, this graph indicates the total number of times the web service was called. In this case, 8,297 calls were made during the week to calculate a sales tax with 1,888 calls occurring on May 13.
Further analysis on the UserId field shows how those calls were distributed amongst the subscribers to the service. Below we see our highest volume subscriber "Flixco" responsible for 5,414 of the sales tax calculator calls for the week. From here, data for Flixco could be pulled into spreadsheet form for further analysis and even usage-based billing. Additionally, based on the configuration set by the Administrator, reports may also be viewed here for sales tax activity by State, the total sales tax calculated, and most requested product codes.
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