<!-- Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
 or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
 distributed with this work for additional information
 regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
 to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
 "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
 with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 
 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
 software distributed under the License is distributed on an
 "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
 KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
 specific language governing permissions and limitations
 under the License.
-->

    <section id="dates-in-usage-record">
        <title>Dates in the Usage Record</title>
        <para>Usage records include a start date and an end date. These dates define the period of time for which the raw usage number was calculated. If daily aggregation is used, the start date is midnight on the day in question and the end date is 23:59:59 on the day in question (with one exception; see below). A virtual machine could have been deployed at noon on that day, stopped at 6pm on that day, then started up again at 11pm. When usage is calculated on that day, there will be 7 hours of running VM usage (usage type 1) and 12 hours of allocated VM usage (usage type 2). If the same virtual machine runs for the entire next day, there will 24 hours of both running VM usage (type 1) and allocated VM usage (type 2).</para>
        <para>Note: The start date is not the time a virtual machine was started, and the end date is not the time when a virtual machine was stopped. The start and end dates give the time range within which usage was calculated.</para>
    <para>For network usage, the start date and end date again define the range in which the number of bytes transferred was calculated. If a user downloads 10 MB and uploads 1 MB in one day, there will be two records, one showing the 10 megabytes received and one showing the 1 megabyte sent.</para>
    <para>There is one case where the start date and end date do not correspond to midnight and 11:59:59pm when daily aggregation is used. This occurs only for network usage records. When the usage server has more than one day's worth of unprocessed data, the old data will be included in the aggregation period. The start date in the usage record will show the date and time of the earliest event. For other types of usage, such as IP addresses and VMs, the old unprocessed data is not included in daily aggregation.</para>
    </section>