3.1.46 Pricing Unit

The Pricing Unit represents a service-provider-specified measurement unit for determining unit prices, indicating how the service provider rates measured usage and purchase quantities after applying pricing rules like block pricing. Common examples include the number of hours for compute appliance runtime (e.g., Hours), gigabyte-hours for a storage appliance (e.g., GB-Hours), or an accumulated count of requests for a network appliance or API service (e.g., 1000 Requests). Pricing Unit complements the Pricing Quantity metric. Distinct from the Consumed Unit, it focuses on pricing and cost, not resource and service consumption, often at a coarser granularity.

PricingUnit adheres to the following requirements:

• PricingUnit MUST be present in a Cost and Usage FOCUS dataset.
• PricingUnit MUST be of type String.
• PricingUnit MUST conform to StringHandling requirements.
• PricingUnit SHOULD conform to UnitFormat requirements.
• PricingUnit nullability is defined as follows:
  • PricingUnit MUST be null when PricingQuantity is null.
  • PricingUnit MUST NOT be null when PricingQuantity is not null.
• When PricingUnit is not null, PricingUnit adheres to the following additional requirements:
  • PricingUnit MUST be semantically equal to the corresponding pricing measurement unit provided in service-provider-published price list.
  • PricingUnit MUST be semantically equal to the corresponding pricing measurement unit provided in invoice, when the invoice includes a pricing measurement unit.

Service-provider-specified measurement unit for determining unit prices, indicating how the service provider rates measured usage and purchase quantities after applying pricing rules like block pricing.