Cost Explorer

The RelativityOne Cost Explorer gives you access to billing and usage data for your RelativityOne instances.

This functionality assists users to:

• Monitor Billing and Usage: Track current and historical billing details alongside associated usage trends.
• Estimate Costs: Perform cost estimations before the end of a billing period.
• Simplify Invoice Review: Correlate usage data with specific charges to review your invoice in detail.

• Data Usage—provides a snapshot of billable data usage, Extend Products usage, and associated cost.
• Users—summary of total users, including billable ones and their cost.
• Staging—overview of the Peak Staging Usage by GB and associated cost.
  Notes:

  • The cost information presented across all tabs is dependent on your RelativityOne subscription plan. For instances subscribed via our distributor partners, all cost data fields are disabled.
  • Special pricing arrangements (such as complimentary thresholds) are not reflected in the presented data.
  • A 0.1 tolerance threshold is built in for all data displayed in Cost Explorer.
  • The data from the Relativity server is not supported and unavailable.
  • The supported currency for cost fields is US Dollar only.

All presented metrics are accessible through the Billing Insights API – ideal for integrating billing metrics into your billing systems or for your advanced reporting purposes.

Before the Cost Explorer's introduction, RelativityOne billing scripts offered a method for estimating usage and costs. However, it's crucial to note that the Cost Explorer is now the definitive source for accurate billing information. Data presented within the results of Billing Statistics – case rollup and Billing Statistics - RelativityOne case rollup scripts may exhibit noticeable differences compared to the Cost Explorer. For more information, see the comparison table below.

• Understanding and measuring cost in RelativityOne
• Billing Insights API (REST)
• Repository workspace billing structure

Security permissions

To access the Cost Explorer tab and its associated data, users need to be members of a group added at the instance level with security permissions outlined below to gain access to these tabs.

For further guidance on setting the correct permissions, see Setting instance permissions.

Using Cost Explorer

To access the Cost Explorer report, type Cost Explorer in the Quick nav Search bar. For more information, see Navigation or Management Console.

Note: The Contextual Billing Help toggle is located on the right side of the screen and is enabled by default. This feature displays informative banners that offer valuable insights into Relativity billing and the Cost Explorer. These banners provide additional context to aid in understanding and managing billing data effectively. To minimize visual clutter, you can disable the toggle to hide all banners.

There are three unique designators at the top of the Cost Explorer:

• Contract Name—A unique identifier of your subscription

• Instance Name (ID)—The unique identifier for your instance. The ID value is the string to be used as part of the authentication process to the Billing Insights API.

• Report Date—This field denotes the time stamp of data collection for each tab. The Report Date field should reflect a timestamp within the last 36 hours. For previous months, this will show the last date the data was collected for the month.

Quick search

The search bar, positioned adjacent to the date selector, allows you to rapidly filter data by Client, Matter, and Workspace (names and IDs). This functionality applies across all elements, including Excel exports, ensuring consistency throughout tabs and queries. Navigation remains consistent across all tabs. Notably, search results are determined by the lowest selected level in the hierarchy (Client > Matter > Workspace).

Note: Due to aggregated storage at the Instance level, Staging data lacks breakdowns by Client, Matter, or Workspace. Consequently, these filters will not yield results for Staging data.

Quick search displays three types of results, 5 items per type, in the following order:

1. Client
2. Matter
3. Workspace

Type the name of any client, matter, or workspace in the Search bar to narrow down your results. Results appear after you type more than one character, and they refine with each character you type. You can select more than one result under the same type. For example, you can select two different clients.

If you add more than one type, the chips will gray out based on the order of selection. Inactive chips will be disregarded as search criteria.

Click Clear or X to restart the quick search criteria.

Time frame selector

The Cost Explorer utilizes a date selector with a drop-down menu to filter data by year and month. The default view, upon initial access, displays the previous month's data, providing a comprehensive overview of usage within that period. Users can navigate to the current month to view usage up to the present date, though this data may be subject to change due to ongoing RelativityOne activity. Historical data is supported and accessible from January 1, 2022.

• The Cost Explorer displays estimated billable values for the current month based on current usage. These values may be subject to change due to ongoing RelativityOne activity within your organization. A warning message within the tab highlights this limitation.
• New months are automatically added to the calendar on the first day of each month.
  Note: The data for the new month may not be available on the first day, but it should be accessible within 48 hours of the month starting.
  
  
  Use the year and month drop-down menus to filter the data view.

Data usage tab

RelativityOne employs a continuous process to determine the Peak Day for billing purposes. This involves daily calculations of the "Review Total" for each day within a month. The Review Total represents the sum of all billable review sizes across all review workspaces in your entire RelativityOne subscription, regardless of geographical location. If a particular day's Review Total surpasses any previously calculated total for the month, that day becomes designated as the Peak Day. For deployments encompassing multiple Production RelativityOne instances, the Review Totals are calculated and summed across all instances. This ensures the Peak Day reflects the highest overall review activity across the entire subscription, and consequently, all data labeled "billable" in the Data Usage tab reflects the sizes reported on the Peak Day.

Determining the size of a workspace involves calculating the combined size of Natives, Images, and Production Images stored within it. Any documents lacking these elements are charged as Text Only Documents.

Note: The Review Total excludes any data linked from a Repository Workspace.

The Data Usage tab includes:

• Billable Data Usage by GB widget—The peak file size in GB is divided into Data Tiers [excluding Staging]. This value includes documents with files, Text Only Documents and accounts for Linked Files.
• Billable Data Usage Cost widget—The peak file cost in US dollars is divided into Data Tiers [excluding Staging]. This value includes documents with files, Text Only Documents, and accounts for Linked Files.

Workspaces table

The Workspaces table includes:

Customize table

The Cost Explorer table initially presents a core set of data points related to workspace usage and cost. Users can leverage the "Customize Table" feature to tailor the displayed columns and personalize their view. The order of fields cannot be modified.

Note: While the Cost Explorer table allows users to customize displayed columns, this functionality does not extend to Excel exports. All fields are invariably included when generating an Excel report.

Users tab

The User tab within the Cost Explorer offers a clear view of user statistics relevant to your RelativityOne subscription. This includes the total number of unique users, categorized as either billable or non-billable, along with the associated cost for billable users as outlined in your subscription.

Note: This report excludes users solely associated with the Relativity server environment. However, the system will identify any users who exist in both RelativityOne and the server environment.

Users tab includes:

• Total Users widget—The total number of users, including not billable.
If you have more than one instance included in the contract, Billable Users Cost widget will be hidden. If a user is present in both instances, they will be present in the Users table and included in the Total Users widget in both instances.

• Billable Users Cost widget—The cost of users which are billable based on your RelativityOne subscription.
Note: The cost widget is hidden if there is more than one Instance under the RelativityOne subscription or the Quick search is used.

Users table

The Users table consists of users who are included in the invoice for a given month.

Field	Description
Email Address	User's email address. If the email address is unclear, then username is replaced by hash and domain name remains unhashed.
User Artifact ID	The unique system-level Artifact ID associated with the user. Note: Due to technical constraints, it is not possible to sort by User Artifact ID in the Users table.
User Access Level	User type defined based on the email address domain configured in the customer subscription. Regular System Administrator
Type	User type is defined based on the email address domain configured in the customer subscription. Internal External
User Activity	Information if the user has accessed the RelativityOne in a given month. Active Inactive
Last Login	Date on which the user last logged into the system. This field reports login activity for up to 12 months. If the field is empty, the user has either never logged in or their last login was more than a year ago.
Billable Status	Billable user's status Billable RelativityOne Billable Server (if the account is present in both RelativityOne and Relativity Server) Non-billable
Additional Information	Supplementary information regarding billable status, such as Relativity Connect or Justice for Change.

Staging tab

The Staging tab provides a quick glimpse into your staging area's usage and associated costs. Here, you'll find the Peak Staging Usage, displayed in Gigabytes (GB), which reflects the highest data volume observed within your instance's staging area for a given month (Staging Peak Day). Additionally, the Billable Staging Cost details the expense incurred based on your subscription agreement. For more information on finding out the number and size of files and folders, see Staging Reports.

• For single-instance deployments, the staging data size simply reflects the Peak Day usage. Multi-instance deployments require calculating the aggregated staging size by summing the Peak Day values from each individual instance.

• This section displays the amount of data exceeding your subscription's threshold within the staging area.

Limitations:

• Staging data is currently unavailable for searches using the Quick Search function, as it's only presented at the instance level. For deployments encompassing multiple RelativityOne instances, the widgets within the Staging tab will be hidden.

Below are the top-level directories that contribute to staging usage. See Staging Area for more information.

• ARM—a folder for archiving workspaces and for staging restores via the ARM application.
• StructuredData—a folder for importing and exporting workspace data using Import/Export  and Integration Points. Refer to  Import/Export and Integration Points documentation for more information.
  Note: The StructuredData folder is included in your Staging threshold and will be calculated and billed the same as the existing Staging folders (ProcessingSource, ARM, and TenantVM). The Export folder was removed in September 2024 and is longer be billable.
• ProcessingSource—a folder for storing files you want to process into your RelativityOne workspace.
• TenantVM—a folder to temporarily store Utility Server virtual machine (UVM) workflows. Refer to  Utility Server documentation for more information.
  

Note: RelativityOne has streamlined its staging boundaries to bolster platform security and improve processing times to your environment. Data cannot be written or accessed outside the defined staging area folders, and the FTA, Temp, Export, and dtSearch folders have been deprecated. For more information, see the Staging FAQ article in Community.

The Staging tab includes:

• Peak Staging Usage by GB widget - This widget shows your total Peak Staging Usage.
• Billable Staging Cost widget - The bursting data cost

Instances table  

Excel export

You can export the data from the tables in the Data usage, Users, and Staging tabs to Microsoft Excel.

Note: Export will be affected by the search criteria used in Quick search. All records in the view will be exported regardless of how many records are displayed per page.

Click the Export button. The filename will be generated according to the following pattern: Cost Explorer + <month> + <YEAR> + "-" + <generation timestamp in UTC timezone>.

Cost explorer vs billing statistics scripts