New in the Orbit: product updates from April and May

At Orb, we're committed to providing our customers with powerful tools to monitor and manage their usage and billing data. In our latest release, we've introduced several exciting new features that offer greater observability of your event data, enhance the developer experience, and provide greater flexibility in managing subscriptions. Read on to learn more about the 90-day events lookback, alerts in the API, cached usage responses, and a new Update Subscription endpoint.

90-day events lookback

In the Events tab, you can now view and download events ingested into Orb from the past 90 days.

Events on the page can be filtered to pre-configured ranges or a custom date range. You can filter events based on their properties using the event filter button. Should you need it, you can use SQL directly in-product to filter the desired set of events. You may use this when you’d like to investigate the set of events that make up a specific line item in an invoice or if you’d like to confirm that Orb is ingesting all events during implementation. Learn more here.

Alerts in the API 

In addition to configuring alerts in the web app, you can configure alerts programmatically through our API, enhancing your ability to monitor customer usage and spend at scale. Alerts can trigger webhooks when credit balances, costs, or usage thresholds are exceeded for customers or subscriptions. These alerts can notify internal teams of anomalous activity, power an overage notification workflow to customers, or prevent excessive product feature use. 

To learn more about alerts in Orb, see our product documentation.

Support for cached usage responses

Orb now supports returning precomputed responses on the subscription costs, customer costs, and subscription usage endpoints. Cached values can be requested via the `Orb-Cache-Control` header.

By default, these endpoints will always recalculate the latest results by querying over the most recent data. Orb can now also serve cached results if requested. Note that cached data is not guaranteed to be entirely fresh and is meant to serve use cases such as an initial load where performance on the critical path is important.

In the response, Orb returns a timestamp, representing the latest time the results are guaranteed to be captured. This timestamp can display the freshness to the user or for your system to decide whether re-querying the endpoint for the latest data is required.

Check out our documentation for a more detailed explanation of request and response semantics.

New endpoint: Update subscription

You can now use the Update Subscription API endpoint to update the terms of an existing subscription. You might use this when you need to update: 

• The memo on a specific subscription’s invoice. 
• The auto-collection settings(to determine if issued invoices for this subscription will be automatically charged with the saved payment method). 
• The subscription’s metadata mapping.

Learn more here.