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Cost Transparency and Billing API

4 posts · Oct 2023 – Aug 2026

What this trail covers

Temporal Cloud offers enhanced cost transparency through a new Billing API and the Billable Action Count metric. The Billing API provides namespace- and tag-level cost attribution with hourly granularity. The Billable Action Count metric offers granular usage information for namespaces and workflow types. This post details the migration of the billing store to ClickHouse, improving headroom, reducing steady-state cost, and accelerating usage data delivery to customers. The migration involved validating metering pipeline accuracy by comparing direct Temporal Server queries with the emitted Billable Actions metric, enabling granular debugging of discrepancies by Workflow Type and Action Type. This improved confidence in the metering pipeline and streamlined troubleshooting.

All Temporal trails
  1. Running out of runway: migrating Temporal Cloud's billing store to ClickHouseThis post details the migration of Temporal Cloud's billing store from a previous warehouse solution to ClickHouse. The migration focused on improving data processing latency, reducing steady-state costs, and increasing available headroom for future growth. Key technical contributions include: implementing a new data pipeline leveraging ClickHouse's efficient deduplication at read time, re-implementing customer-facing API queries and a scheduled aggregation workflow to read from ClickHouse, and developing a rigorous validation strategy involving parallel runs and a comparison framework to identify and categorize differences between the old and new systems. A significant defect caught was an integer overflow in ClickHouse's aggregation of large integer columns, which was resolved by casting before aggregation and adding a specific test case. The rollout strategy prioritized reversibility, migrating read-only APIs first and the critical aggregation path last, with a phased, account-by-account approach.
  2. Dogfooding the Billable Actions metric: How granular observability improved our metering validationThis post details how Temporal internally used the newly released Billable Actions metric and OpenMetrics endpoint to validate their metering pipeline. It describes the previous lack of granularity in the usage dashboard and how the new metric, broken down by `action_type` and `temporal_workflow_type`, allows for precise identification of cost drivers. The post highlights the internal use case of comparing direct Temporal Server queries with the emitted metric to debug discrepancies, leading to a more robust and efficient validation process. It also outlines the benefits for customers, including improved usage visibility, optimization opportunities, and validation capabilities.
  3. Getting the most out of the Billable Action Count metricThis post details practical ways to use the new `temporal_cloud_v1_billable_action_count` metric for cost analysis, debugging, and alerting. It explains what the metric is and isn't (usage estimates, not the bill; excludes certain actions; aggregated, not per execution). It provides PromQL queries for usage optimization analysis (identifying expensive Workflow Types and Action Types, combining dimensions, estimating total actions over 24 hours) and debugging (finding rare bugs via action type anomalies, spotting deployment regressions). It also offers alerting strategies for Action volume spikes relative to baseline, both at the Namespace and Workflow Type level.
  4. Improved cost transparency with usage-based billingIntroduces the Temporal Cloud Billing API for namespace- and tag-level cost attribution with hourly granularity, and the Billable Action Count metric for granular usage information (1-minute granularity). Details how report generation requests are mapped to Temporal Workflows, using Workflow Queries for status, Signals for queuing, and Child Workflows for processing. Implements account-level queuing and global rate-limiting using these Temporal primitives to manage concurrency and fairness with backend data sources that have low rate limits.
  5. Upcoming changes to Temporal Cloud meteringThis post details updates to Temporal Cloud's metering for Schedules, Workflow Updates, Child Workflows, and Local Activities. Schedules will be metered as 2 actions per trigger (excluding workflow start). Workflow Updates will be metered as 1 action. Child Workflows will be metered as 1 action for spawning and 1 action for execution. Local Activities associated with one Workflow Task will count as 1 action, with additional actions for subsequent heartbeats and retries. These changes are effective November 1st and are designed to be net-neutral for most customers.