Adding Custom Fields
Custom fields are a great way to enrich your data to allow for more granular reporting and filtering of your Advanced Billing subscription and billing data. Find out more about custom fields here.
These can be added to your Advanced Billing data via a few different methods:
- Manually add and populate a custom field to a Customer or Subscription in Advanced Billing. More information is available here.
- Use our API to create and populate custom fields.
- Our Salesforce integration allows you to update custom fields. Read more about Salesforce custom fields here.
Please note that if you add a new custom field after the subscription was created, or input a value on an existing custom field that was blank, your data sources will need to be re-generated to reflect the new values. Please contact your Customer Success Manager or support@maxio.com for assistance.
Using the Advanced Billing API endpoint method
Advanced Billing Business Intelligence is powered by Keen. Keen’s well-established, highly scalable event data store and the Advanced Billing API endpoint allow you to stream in any third-party data (i.e. Salesforce, Zendesk, Jira, etc.) to Advanced Billing Business Intelligence. Documentation on how to create the endpoint and start streaming data from your own applications and systems can be found here. Third-party data streamed to Advanced Billing becomes available to query and visualize in the same way as our built-in data sources. Visualizations of Advanced Billing data and third-party data can be added to a single dashboard for side-by-side context. For in-line context, we recommend using the Custom Fields method.
If you use Advanced Billing’s real-time, usage-based billing model, Events-Based Billing, you will be familiar with this streaming method. If not, the data streamed to Advanced Billing Business Intelligence is also available to be used for billing at any time with an Events-Based Billing model.
Airbyte.io Method
Airbyte is a data integration platform that offers no code and open-source solutions to sync your data with Advanced Billing. Read more about this integration here.
Apache Kafka endpoint method
Advanced Billing Business Intelligence is built on top of the Keen technology (powered by Apache Kafka), giving you the option to connect over Kafka protocol programmatically. In recent years Apache Kafka became the industry standard for data streaming applications. Advanced Billing fully supports open-source standardization and on request can provide access to the Kafka endpoints.
You can use the endpoint to programmatically stream your application data and data from tools in your technology stack to Advanced Billing Business Intelligence over a widely supported and robust protocol.. This enables you to cross-reference third-party data against the Advanced Billing built-in data sources. You can visualize both datasets side-by-side on a single dashboard and see your critical application and billing metrics together.
If you depend on Apache Kafka or any other queuing system like AMQP, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, or Microsoft Azure Service Bus for your own applications (which is widely known as the Event-Bus Architecture), we highly recommend evaluating stream mirroring/forwarding. By leveraging the Advanced Billing Kafka endpoint and stream mirroring, you can stream part of that data to Advanced Billing Business Intelligence and analyze it with your billing data.
There is a wide range of open-source software that natively supports streaming over Apache Kafka protocol and allows you to integrate various systems together. To name a few: Airbyte.io, Apache Camel, and many independent Kafka connectors. We recommend reviewing various data repositories you might have: your data lakes, your databases, popular third-party systems (e.g. Zendesk, Jira, Twilio, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, etc.). and evaluating streaming this data to Advanced Billing Business Intelligence to run powerful analytics on all the datasets in one tool.
If you are interested in connecting to the Apache Kafka endpoints or, more specifically, in integrating any of your applications and systems with Advanced Billing Business Intelligence please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@maxio.com to get the required access information and assistance in implementation.