Monthly Electron Data Usage

I was curious if there was a way to see the actual data used for the previous month? I couldn’t find anything in the dashboard. The SIM invoice email also doesn’t indicate the actual usage. As I begin to add more electrons, it would be great to see the monthly breakdown of data usage for each device or the total amount of data used for the account.

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Hey there @knoose. Thanks for the feedback–we don’t have a good way of displaying historical data usage yet except for doing manual pulls by ICCID. It’s definitely on our roadmap, and you’re not the only one asking for it.

If you’d like a detailed usage report in the meantime, we can provide one to you. Submit a ticket at support.particle.io and we’ll send it over.

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@will any progress on getting this built into the dashboard/console? Can you share any roadmap details with respect to this feature? Seems like the detailed usage data must already be present cloud-side on particle’s servers - the per-device data usage spark lines displayed in the billing console must get generated somehow.

To clarify, what I’d like to be able to get at is a breakdown of cell data usage on a per-session basis - as recorded cloud-side. I’m aware there’s counters made avaible in the electron firmware to get at a device-side record of data usage.

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@jeiden

Hi there,

This is certainly a great suggestion. Yes, you are correct @mfogel – usage data is stored on our back-end. It would be a matter of exposing this via APIs and creating front-end interfaces for you fine folks :slight_smile: .

This is certainly on our radar and something that has clear value. However, I do not have an accurate timeframe for when we will build this at the moment. In the meantime, if you need this information badly, we can pull this data for you ad-hoc if you write into hello@particle.io. I’m sure this is not a completely satisfying answer, but unfortunately we are still a small engineering team with many competing priorities!

Thanks,

Jeff

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@jeiden, like @mfogel, I’d love to have some per-session reports available. Or hourly timestamped data would be useful too. Doesn’t matter if availability is delayed, so long as the timestamp matches the actual data usage at that time. I emailed support asking for per-session or hourly usage and got back a bar graph of daily usage, which isn’t terribly helpful for debugging (my need right now). Is per-session or hourly data available? :smile:

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I’m going to have to defer to Will and Jeff’s responses above. I don’t believe the data usage gets down to per session granularity on the backend, but I haven’t stared at it as much as others on the team have. Also I’d want to know what your idea of a “session” is. In cellular terms, it’s each active PDP Context.

Did you know you can track the data usage right on the Electron?

This isn’t as easy to use as pulling up a report on the Console would be if implemented like you suggested, but the numbers are in line with those pulled from the backend. You just have to keep on top of resetting, tracking and storing the information.

Thanks @BDub. Regarding the definition of “session”, my experience is only with the Hologram MVNO. Each time I used deep sleep, it closed the “session”. So each publish resulted in a new “session” and I could see how I was billed for each one. Pretty handy. If I didn’t sleep the radio, then usage accumulated under a single session in the billing data. I’m not sure how Particle compares to Hologram in handling of the PDP context during deep sleep. (And I can’t say I understand how it works anyway :wink: ).
I had used getDataUsage() too, but may have had some glitches.

Hey @bioagbob,

We are actively working on new functionality for product creators to manage a fleet of SIM cards. As part of this work, we plan to provide a way to export granular reports on individual SIM data usage in the current billing period. Unclear if it will be session by session yet, but stay tuned :slight_smile:

Jeff

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Hi @jeiden,

Just submitted a ticket for getting past data usage on my electrons.

Would like to be able to do this in an automated fashion… Would you say the best way to do this via api today is to hit the https://api.particle.io/v1/sims/{ ICCID }/data_usage endpoint on a daily basis for each of my sims?

Hey @hwestbrook,

Sorry for the delay, have been on vacation and am just getting caught back up. Yes, at this point that API endpoint is your best bet. Down the road we will likely provide APIs for historical data usage.

Also, if you are working on a professional product, I would suggest checking out the new SIM Management for Products toolset.

Jeff