Time and date

The Azure Services Usage Collector creates one JSON file per date. Based on the usage time zone you specify for the collection job with processInfo , each usage record is written to the file for the day during which its end time occurs. The load job then uses the JSON Collector to collect a complete day’s worth of usage records and convert them to CC Records.

Timestamps in the usage data are always UTC, but have no indication of the zone offset. You must explicitly set the zone to UTC with the dateTimeZone property in your feed configuration for usage data. The timestamp format can vary by provider, with only the website data including milliseconds. Set the dateTimePattern property to yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.

Event data includes offsets in its timestamps, so you don’t need to set a time zone in your feed configurations for offers and subscriptions. Set dateTimePattern to ISO8601 .

Timeframes for usage measurements vary by provider: some produce hourly records while others only produce daily records. These timeframes can cross date boundaries. When this happens, the usage is accounted for on the day the time frame ends. In the sample load job, aggregation only occurs for records with the same timeframe and no granularity is lost. For example, a reporting user can drill down on virtual machine usage to see hourly detail.