Billing & Quotas¶
Depending on which plan you're on with Argus, you might have seen two concepts that are coming up when it comes to plan selection and billing. In the following, we're describing these terms and which influence they have on your included quota.
Checks¶
A monitor consists of one or more checks. For each monitoring location you're selecting for a monitor, a check is being created.
Decoupling the concept of a monitor from the underlying checks that form the availability status of a monitor allows for a fair accounting of monitoring activity as it makes a vast difference in computing power whether you're observing a single monitor from 1 or 9 different locations.
All Argus plans contain a certain amount of checks instead of monitors. It's up to the customer how these checks are being used.
Free Plan Example
Argus' Free plan consists of 50 checks. A user could for example monitor 50 different services from 1 location or 5 services from 10 different locations. This heavily depends on the user making the trade-off between reliability of a monitoring result and the investment of needed checks to achieve said certainty.
Phone Notifications¶
A phone notification is a single SMS message or a single phone call that is being dispatched to a contact due to a notifiable event (a monitor going up or down).
Calculation Example
A customer has configued a phone call notification for a monitor for both event types (up and down).
The monitor goes down and the customer receives a phone call. It then goes up again and the customer receives another phone call. These two events and notifications are counted as two separate notifications. After the described events, the customer will have used two phone notifications from their quota.
Included¶
Some plans may include a certain amount of phone notifications.
The amount of included phone notifications are based on the calendar month. That way, the calculation is easier for us and more fair for the customer. On the first day of each calendar month, the amount of dispatched phone notifications is being reset to zero. It's not possible to carry over unused included phone notifications into the next calendar month.
If the customer has used up all their included phone notifications for a calendar month, no further phone notifications (SMS messages or phone calls) will be carried out in that calendar month. The customer will receive a billing notification to their account e-mail address stating what was described above.
Additional¶
Customers on a plan that entitles them to use phone notifications are able to purchase credits for additional phone notifications. As the name suggests, customers can use these to receive phone notifications when they have used up all their included phone notifications for a calendar month.
Additional phone notifications are being purchased and prepaid in advance in batches of 50 notifications with linear pricing. They are valid for a period of 3 years starting from the day after the purchase was completed. They are only used when there are no more included phone notifications left in a calendar month. Included phone notifications always take precedence over additional phone notifications.
Please note that additional phone notification credits can not be refunded or paid out.