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I guess it depends on what perspective you're looking for. OpenStack sends usage information to an AMQP queue for consumption. This is generally for use by the provider and not the end-user however.

This is how the currently deployed public clouds collect usage data.

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Like I said, it doesn't provide nice simple API calls for collecting usage information. You have to collect it yourself (from the queue, using PSHB or something.) Then you have to then make your own interface for your billing system to then request records it is interested in from this collection.

CloudStack providing simple API calls that allow you to request usage for any time period is much nicer. It can interface more directly with a billing system.

It's just one of the examples of OpenStack seeming to be kind of "halfway there", whereas CloudStack is much closer to being ready to go.

The queue of usage events is an API for collecting usage information, but it sounds like it's not as high a layer as you'd like to see.

There is also the (new) Ceilometer project which sounds like it implements what you're looking for:

https://github.com/stackforge/ceilometer

It is new, so it's probably not as mature as other options, but it has had a lot of activity recently.

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