Axeda Usage is designed to support an organization's ability to track the frequency and volume of use that their assets are experiencing in the field. The Axeda® Connected Product Management Applications support the ability of manufacturers to service their customer, by providing current and historical data about the state of the asset. To this core competency, the Usage application adds the ability to abstract that "raw" data into a set of higher-level, business-oriented data. Instead of presenting data such as the value of a data item called "counter-1," the application abstracts that data into useful information, such as "black-and-white copies made per day." This data can be filtered and grouped by asset, by organization, by location, and so on. The pages of the Usage application show the frequency or volume for particular usage items for particular assets. The pages enable you to flexibly filter and aggregate usage information, (optionally) display billing estimate information, graph, export, and print the data. Filtering enables you to refine the list of data to display. You can filter information by organization, location, model, usage item, and asset group. Filtering limits the list to show only those assets that match the filter criteria. Aggregating enables you to combine related items. For example, rather than showing individual usage information for all assets, you might want to see the total usage for assets at a particular location. Aggregating combines rows of data. Data such as amount of toner remaining, or level of reagent remaining, do not represent usage items. These are consumables, which are not addressed in this release. In addition, SLA monitoring is not addressed in this release of Axeda Usage.
Note: This release of the Axeda Usage application does not support Axeda IDM Agents. For information about the supported features of the IDM Agents, refer to Axeda® IDM Agents.
For the Usage application, usage data is derived from countable quantities, called usage items. A usage item is a metric that is measured in discrete units. Examples of usage item metrics include number of black and white copies, number of blood tests, among others. A usage item is a measurement of the uses of an asset. A usage item is not tied to a particular model. Rather, a usage item is the result of a calculation performed on one of a set of data items. That is to say, different data items in different models may be transformed into the same usage item. (For example, two copier models have different data items that both mean "number of black and white copies.")
1. First, as the running total for the asset for the usage item.
2. Secondly, as a delta from the last reading.
For example, if a copier has made 10,000 copies as of Monday and 11,000 copies as of Tuesday, the Tuesday delta value is stored as "1000." Usage items are defined as arriving from the asset as either a delta or a running total. This definition enables the application to determine which of the two values needs to be calculated. If your environment requires, you can write custom components that perform additional calculations on usage items before they are stored. The data from assets are transformed into usage data on a pre-configured, but system-configurable, schedule (using the XML configuration file of the Scheduler component). By default, the calculation thread runs twice a day (every 12 hours).
Note: When a usage item is configured, an optional configuration parameter indicates that the usage calculation should be performed in real time (when the asset data is processed) rather than on the schedule.
Because usage items are associated with data items, which are associated with models, security on usage items is determined by model security. If a user does not have the security rights to see at least one of the models associated with a usage item, they cannot see the usage item.