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Operations & Administration (Control)

Cost watch: alerts on prices and costs

ForOperatorAdministration

Two watchers run alongside: one checks the providers' prices and the lifetime of the models in use every day, the other checks every hour whether costs are getting out of hand anywhere. What they find appears as an alert in the cockpit.

Why#

A provider changes its price, a model is deprecated, an account uses ten times as much overnight, a GPU machine runs without an appointment — otherwise all of this only shows up with the invoice. Cost watch reports it the same day, bundled and without a flood of e-mails, and never changes a price by itself.

How it works#

  1. 1Operator: open “Alerts” (address /admin/warnungen) — or the “Alerts” tile in the IT control centre.
  2. 2At the top are the open alerts by severity: critical, warning, notice. Each says what happened, how much and since when.
  3. 3For each alert set the status (open, acknowledged, resolved), choose a person responsible and write a note; everything is recorded in the history.
  4. 4Under “Price proposals” is every price that differs on the provider's page from the cost rate — with old and new value, link to the source and the literal excerpt. Only “Adopt” with a reason turns it into the new rate from today; “Reject” leaves everything as it is.
  5. 5Under “Thresholds” the limits from which alerts are raised can be set; under “Provider invoices” the monthly invoices for comparison with the recorded costs.
  6. 6Administration of an organisation: “Usage alerts” (address /admin/kostenwarnungen) shows its own allowances, usage peaks and conspicuous accounts — without the provider's prices.

Settings and switches#

No switch of its own in the feature catalogue — the feature belongs to its surroundings.

What is checked#

  • Daily: the price of every documented cost rate on the provider's page, the lifecycle of every model in use (deprecated, retirement, where an alias points) and the ECB reference rate.
  • Hourly: daily costs per customer, feature and provider against the moving average, allowances at 80, 95 and 100 percent, individual accounts against their organisation, each customer's margin against the minimum margin, GPU machines without an appointment, repeated render failures and — if entered — the provider's invoice against the recorded costs.
  • If a price page cannot be read, that is an alert too: the price is then unchecked, and the link or the reader needs a look.

Who may do what#

“Alerts” (/admin/warnungen) is seen and edited only by the operator: status, person responsible, notes, thresholds, invoices and adopting a price proposal. “Usage alerts” (/admin/kostenwarnungen) is seen by an organisation's administration — only for its own organisation and without prices, own costs or margin.

Tips#

  • The same matter creates only one alert; an hourly run counts it up instead of creating a new one. E-mails are bundled, at most every few hours — only something newly critical goes out immediately.
  • A conspicuous account appears in alert and e-mail only with its ID; who it is is shown by “View account” in the cockpit.

Related features#