---
title: "Getting the most out of the Billable Action Count metric"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/getting-the-most-out-of-the-billable-action-count-metric-sohswtu6c
source_url: https://temporal.io/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-the-billable-action-count-metric
type: article
source: "Temporal"
published: 2026-08-06T10:37:29.680Z
updated: 2026-08-06T10:41:52.239Z
tags: ["observability", "finops", "prometheus", "workflow-orchestration"]
reading_time: 10
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Getting the most out of the Billable Action Count metric

**[Temporal](https://daily.dev/sources/temporal)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Temporal Cloud's new `temporal_cloud_v1_billable_action_count` metric exposes per-second billable action rates broken down by Workflow Type and Action Type. The post walks through practical PromQL queries for cost analysis (identifying top Action consumers, estimating 24-hour totals), debugging (detecting rare code paths and deployment regressions by observing unexpected Action Type spikes), and alerting (ratio-based spike detection, retry-rate thresholds). Operational notes cover query conventions (avoid rate()/increase()), 3-minute data latency, API rate limits (180 req/hour), and cardinality management for the high-cardinality metric. The metric is explicitly not a billing substitute but is the most granular near-real-time tool for understanding Action consumption patterns.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://temporal.io/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-the-billable-action-count-metric>

## Similar posts on daily.dev

- [Improved cost transparency with usage-based billing](https://daily.dev/posts/improved-cost-transparency-with-usage-based-billing-uwkc8hggl) · Temporal · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
- [Dogfooding the Billable Actions metric: How granular observability improved our metering validation](https://daily.dev/posts/dogfooding-the-billable-actions-metric-how-granular-observability-improved-our-metering-validation-tktkekusn) · Temporal · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability), [#finops](https://daily.dev/tags/finops), [#prometheus](https://daily.dev/tags/prometheus), [#workflow-orchestration](https://daily.dev/tags/workflow-orchestration)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/getting-the-most-out-of-the-billable-action-count-metric-sohswtu6c)