More than 740 instance hours used up in a day without any servers running
I'm currently developing a game that uses multiplayer servers from PlayFab. For the month of September, I had no servers running or on standby. However yesterday (11/09/2021) apparently more than 740 instance hours were used up. The only thing I did was deleting some regions from my builds and setting the max servers parameter to 0. Does this cause instance hours to be used? And why so many?
Total usage also shows that there were no servers running.
Best Answer
Answering here, since the info could help others. The Total Usage tab isn't showing you usage for builds you've deleted, which is why it looks like the title hasn't been running servers (I'm talking to the multiplayer team about that). But if you check your Audit History (Audit History PlayFab), you can see what happened. One of the builds you set up in Northern Europe was set to have one server running in Standby Mode, and I don't see that as being turned off until the changes to the build a few days ago. The build was configured to use D2asv4 VMs, so 2 CPU hours per real-world hour, so one VM would use 48 CPU hours per day. Multiply that by the days it was left running, and that gets you the usage.
If you have a look at your Daily CSV from the Billing Summary page (Billing Summary PlayFab), you'll notice that the CPU hours are almost all all landing on 9/6 and 9/11 this month. But if you look at August, you'll see the rest of the hours. Basically, a VM left running due to hosting a server in Standby Mode will "cycle" every 10 days, and hours for hosting are only accumulated when the VM stops. So 10 days after the build was set up to run in Standby would have been August 27th, and then the next 10 day mark would have been August 6th. When you shut down the Standby server on the 11th, that's why the hours for the running VM would have popped in on that day.
Regarding the Total Usage tab: I only deleted the builds a day after I did the modifications to the builds. As far as I know Total Usage updates very frequently, so shouldn't that be enough time to register the usage? Also, Total Usage is showing usage in August for builds that I have deleted. So apparently total usage info isn't deleted after deleting builds, correct?
I think I see what you mean with the build in the Audit History. This one was "unhealthy" after deploying. I'm quite sure that on the Servers tab the standby column showed "0" (unfortunately I don't have a screenshot). Also, normally I would see a standby server either in Total Usage or on the dashboard. This one never showed up, as you can see below (I could only show data for the last 7 days, but it should have been on standby on September 10). It also never showed up before I deleted the builds.
Thanks for the follow-up - I worked on this with the multiplayer team today, and it turns out there is an issue preventing the unhealthy server hours from correctly showing up in the Total Usage tab, so we'll get that fixed. The reason an unhealthy server is accumulating hours is that while it's in that state, the server is kept running so that you can remote into it, to see what the problem is. So if you were to click over to the Virtual Machines tab, you'd see it running there, and the Connect option to get the RDP info.
But since you didn't exceed the 750 free CPU hours, nothing was charged to your account.
May I ask are you in paid subscription plan? Can you submit a support ticket so that we can provide private support?
Unfortunately, I'm not in the paid subscription plan. Thats why I used the forum
For now, please navigate to Contact us (playfab.com) and submit a billing related form. One member of our sales team will contact you and provide dedicated support.
