The Challenge of Monitoring a Billing Platform
Monitoring a billing platform in production is different from running most other software systems: Standard observability tools — infrastructure monitoring, APM, log aggregation — are excellent at telling you when your CPU is spiking, your disk is running low, or your services are throwing exceptions, but billing platforms live at the intersection of infrastructure health and business logic, and that intersection is where generic monitoring tools fall short: Is a sudden drop in invoice generation volume a sign that your system is healthy and your customer base has naturally churned, or is it a symptom of a silent failure? Is a spike in payment retries just expected behavior, or are you about to face a wave of customer complaints?
Answering these questions requires not just raw metrics, but domain knowledge — the ability to interpret billing data in context, understand what normal looks like, and know when to sound the alarm. For teams operating at scale, building and maintaining that layer of intelligence on top of commodity monitoring tools is expensive, fragile, and rarely worth the effort compared to your core product.
Introducing Aviate health
Aviate Health is Kill Bill’s purpose-built observability layer for subscription billing operations. Unlike generic monitoring, Aviate speaks the language of billing natively. The Aviate plugin runs alongside your Kill Bill instance and continuously collects state across a wide range of system and billing metrics — invoice generation rates, payment success/failure ratios, retry queues, parked accounts, overdue balances, and more — computing aggregations and historical summaries that would be prohibitively expensive to query ad hoc.
That structured data then flows into the Aviate Health UI, a dashboard purpose-built to make this information immediately actionable. Rather than confronting operators with raw numbers, the UI provides intelligent alerts, confidence band intervals to distinguish anomalies from normal variance, and trend charts that give historical context at a glance. Each metric comes paired with the interpretation layer that billing teams actually need: what is a healthy range, what warrants investigation, and what demands immediate action. The result is a system that shortens the gap between “something went wrong” and “we know exactly what and for whom” — without requiring your engineering team to become billing domain experts from scratch.
Use Case: Detecting and Diagnosing Billing Failures
In any distributed system, failures are inevitable — this is not a Kill Bill limitation, it is a fundamental reality of software at scale.
Kill Bill has long been designed with this in mind: the system can automatically retry failed billing operations, park accounts (tagging them to make them immediately visible and preventing pointless retry storms), and emit detailed logs for every billing error. What was missing was i/ the underlying data layer to continuously track, compute, and aggregate billing failure events at scale — which the Aviate plugin now handles — and a ii/ unified, visual interface to surface that intelligence in real time and over time.
Our latest Aviate release closes that gap with a dedicated Billing Failures feature. The System Health overview now includes live badges tracking invoice generation failures (with all the details), parked accounts for any of your selected period — giving operators an instant pulse check without having to dig into logs. Clicking through takes you to the new “billing failures” screen, where a stacked bar chart (configurable by hour or day) shows the historical trend of failures, and a filterable account table groups affected accounts by ID so your support and billing operations teams can act precisely and efficiently. Whether you are diagnosing a transient payment gateway outage or hunting down a configuration issue affecting a specific customer segment, the dashboard gives you the historical context and the account-level detail to move fast. (Screenshots below show the new overview badges and the full Billing Failures dashboard.)
Ready to see Aviate Health in action for your Kill Bill deployment? Sign up at aviate.killbill.io and get full observability over your billing platform from day one.
