Monitoring account resource usage

Last updated: Apr 10, 2025

Some service plans charge for compute usage and other types of resource usage. If you are the IBM Cloud account owner or administrator, you can monitor the resources usage to ensure the limits are not exceeded.

For Lite plans, you cannot exceed the limits of the plan. You must wait until the start of your next billing month to use resources that are calculated monthly. Alternatively, you can upgrade to a paid plan.

For most paid plans, you pay for the resources that the tools and processes that are provided by the service consume each month.

To see the costs of your plan, log in to IBM Cloud, open your service instance from your IBM Cloud dashboard, and click Plan.

Capacity unit hours (CUH) for compute usage
Number of catalog assets
Users per service for legacy service plans
Monitor monthly billing

Capacity unit hours (CUH) for compute usage

Many tools consume compute usage that is measured in capacity unit hours (CUH). A capacity unit hour is a specific amount of compute capability with a set cost.

What is measured for CUH consumption?

Resources, whether measured with capacity unit hours (CUH) or resource units (RU) are consumed for running assets, not for working in tools. That is, there is no consumption charge for defining an experiment in AutoAI, but there is a charge for running the experiment to train the experiment pipelines. Similarly, there is no charge for creating a deployment space or defining a deployment job, but there is a charge for running a deployment job or inferencing against a deployed asset. Assets that run continuously, such as Jupyter notebooks, RStudio assets, and Bash scripts consume resources for as long as they are active.

How compute usage is calculated

Different types of processes and different levels of compute power are billed at different rates of capacity units per hour. For example, the hourly rate for a data profiling process is 6 capacity units.

Compute usage for watsonx.ai Studio and IBM Knowledge Catalog is charged by the minute, with a minimum charge of 10 minutes (0.16 hours). Compute usage for watsonx.ai Runtime and DataStage is charged by the minute with a minimum charge of one minute.

Compute usage for watsonx.data intelligence is charged by the minute, with a minimum charge of 10 minutes (0.16 hours).

Compute usage is calculated by adding the minimum number of minutes billed for each process plus the number of minutes the process runs beyond the minimum minutes, then multiplying the total by the capacity unit rate for the process.

The following table shows examples of how the billed CUH is calculated.

Rate	Usage time	Calculation	Total CUH billed
1 CUH/hour	1 hour	1 hour * 1 CUH/hour	1 CUH
2 CUH/hour	45 minutes	0.75 hours * 2 CUH/hour	1.5 CUH
6 CUH/hour	5 minutes	0.16 hours * 6 CUH/hour	0.96 CUH. The minimum charge for watsonx.ai Studio applies.
6 CUH/hour	30 minutes	0.5 hours * 6 CUH/hour	3 CUH
6 CUH/hour	1 hour	1 hour * 6 CUH/hour	6 CUH

Processes that consume capacity unit hours

Some types of processes, such as AutoAI and Federated Learning, have a single compute rate for the runtime. However, with many tools you have a choice of compute resources for the runtime. The notebook editor, Data Refinery, SPSS Modeler, and other tools have different rates that reflect the memory and compute power for the environment. Environments with more memory and compute power consume capacity unit hours at a higher rate.

This table shows each process that consumes CUH, where it runs, and against which service CUH is billed, and whether you can choose from more than one environment. Follow the links to view the available CUH rates for each process.

Table 1. CUH usage
Tool or Process	Workspace	Service that provides CUH	Multiple CUH rates?
Notebook editor	Project	watsonx.ai Studio, Analytics Engine (Spark)	Multiple rates
Invoking the machine learning API from a notebook	Project	watsonx.ai Runtime	Multiple rates
Data Refinery	Project	watsonx.ai Studio or IBM Knowledge Catalog	Multiple rates
SPSS Modeler	Project	watsonx.ai Studio	Multiple rates
RStudio IDE	Project	watsonx.ai Studio	Multiple rates
AutoAI experiments	Project	watsonx.ai Runtime	Multiple rates
Decision Optimization experiments	Spaces	watsonx.ai Runtime	Multiple rates
Running deployments	Spaces	watsonx.ai Runtime	Multiple rates
DataStage flow editor	Project	DataStage	Multiple rates
Profiling	Project and Catalog	IBM Knowledge Catalog	One rate
Metadata enrichment	Project	IBM Knowledge Catalog	One rate
Data quality rules	Project	DataStage	One rate
Orchestration Pipelines	Project and Space	watsonx.ai Studio	Multiple rates

Monitoring compute usage

You can monitor compute usage for all services at the account level. To view the monthly CUH usage for a service, open the service instance from your IBM Cloud dashboard and click Plan.

For the watsonx.ai Studio, watsonx.ai Runtime, and DataStage services, you can also monitor compute usage in a project on the Environments page on the Manage tab.

To see the total amount of capacity unit hours that are used and that are remaining for watsonx.ai Studio and watsonx.ai Runtime, look at the Environment Runtimes page. From the navigation menu, select Administration > Environment runtimes. The Environment Runtimes page shows details of the CUH used by environments. You can calculate the amount of CUH you use for data flows and profiling by subtracting the amount used by environments from the total amount used.

Number of catalog assets

For the IBM Knowledge Catalog Standard and Enterprise Bundle plans, your monthly charges are based on the number of assets in your catalogs. You are charged for the highest number of assets that exist in your catalogs at any time during the month. Assets that are removed from catalogs continue to be counted until you delete them from the trash. See Deleting assets from the trash.

To see how many assets are in a catalog, open the catalog and clear all search filters. The number of assets is listed as the number of search results.

Users per service for legacy service plans

For watsonx.ai Studio Professional plan, you are not charged per user. For watsonx.ai Studio legacy plans (Standard and Enterprise), you can see the number of authorized users on the Authorized Users page in watsonx.ai Studio. Choose Administration > Configurations and settings > Authorized users. You adjust the number of authorized users as they change. You are automatically billed for users above the baseline number of users in your offering plan.

Monitor monthly billing

You must be an IBM Cloud account owner or administrator to see resource usage information.

To view a summary of your monthly billing, from the navigation menu, choose Administration > Account and billing > Billing and usage. The IBM Cloud usage dashboard opens. To view the usage for each service, in the Usage summary section, click View usage.