A monitoring key is a unique string that identifies the quota profile to be used by a policy and charging control (PCC) rule and application detection control (ADC) rule for usage tracking. The monitoring key is associated with the quota profile by selecting a policy action that grants usage to a selected number of quota profiles. You configure monitoring keys through the CMP system.
The PCC Rule Profile is used to populate the Charging Rule Definition attribute-value pair (AVP) and the ADC Rule definition AVP values in a Diameter message when a new rule is installed. Therefore, the monitoring key to be defined in the PCC Rule Profile is specified in the Monitoring Key AVP, which is contained in the Charging Rule Definition or ADC Rule Definition AVP for that particular rule. The monitoring key is supported for Sd messages, and is compatible with both Release 9 and previous releases. When reporting usage to the MPE device, the monitoring key associated with the PCC/ADC Rule is included in a Usage Monitoring AVP, along with the usage accumulated. The usage accumulated is reported for the total volume, uplink volume, or downlink volume.