Metering is the process of capturing and recording usage events so they can be measured, rated, and billed. In cloud and SaaS systems, those events may represent API calls, AI actions, transactions, or machine-to-machine activity. A metering pipeline turns raw telemetry into trusted business records, so it must preserve accuracy, ordering, and completeness.
In cyber security, metering matters because it sits on the trust boundary between operational systems and finance. If attackers can forge, drop, duplicate, or delay usage events, they may cause fraud, revenue leakage, denial of service, or billing disputes. Defenders protect metering with authenticated event ingestion, idempotent processing, validation, audit trails, and strict access control. Good metering also minimizes sensitive data exposure, since usage logs can reveal customer behavior and internal workflows.