Common Bill Ingestion

Common Bill Ingestion (CBI) is a feature of Flexera One that allows the ingestion of public, private, and custom cloud billing data for easy ad-hoc analysis along-side billing data from other sources. It is a common pipeline capable of ingesting virtually any cost or usage time-series billing data.

Multiple use-cases might warrant connecting CBI bills to Flexera One, such as custom cloud or plugin costs, internal/private cloud billing data, or public clouds not natively supported in Flexera One.

The sections in this topic provide more detailed instructions for how to build CBI-friendly bills and integrate them into Flexera One.

Sample Use Cases

The following are only three of the common use cases for when CBI may be used to integrate billing data:

• Adding custom costs to Cloud Cost Optimization

• Integrating internal (private cloud) costs and usage data

• Integrating infrastructure or container-based costs (such as Kubernetes or VMWare)

In order to ingest custom billing data, refer to the CBI Setup Flow instructions. These instructions provide an overview for how to create a CBI Bill Connect and upload it to Flexera One.

CBI Setup Flow

To connect a bill in Flexera One with CBI, perform the following steps:

1. Create a CBI Bill Connect using the Bill Connect API.
2. Convert your billing data into the Common Bill Ingestion Default Format.
   note

   Contact your Flexera account manager and inquire about options if converting to the CBI Default CSV format is difficult or not possible.

3. Upload the bill into Flexera One using the Bill Upload API.

Within a few hours you should see your billing data in Flexera One. (This could take up to 24 hours.)

Limitations

• Bills must be uploaded in the Common Bill Ingestion Default Format.

• The number of files per upload is limited.

• The size of a single, uploaded billing file is limited.

• The time between uploading a set of billing files is limited.

note

See the Bill Upload API documentation for current limits. If your organization needs any of the above limits increased, contact your Flexera account manager.

Required Information

In order to create a CBI Bill Connect via the Bill Connect API, you will need the following information:

Parameter	Value	Note
cbi_integration_id	cbi-oi-optima	The integration ID indicating which integration to use to process the CBI bill. Must be cbi-oi-optima for a bill in the CBI Default CSV format.
cbi_bill_identifier	--anything--	A unique identifier within your Flexera Org for this particular bill. For example, custombill-1.
cbi_name	--anything--	A human-readable description of the bill connect. For example, My Custom Bill 1.
cbi_params	{flexera_one_display_name: --anything--}	A JSON object indicating the desired name to display in Flexera One for this bill connect.

Submit the Information

Follow the CBI Setup Flow to submit the above information to Flexera One.