In our last post we introduced the CGrateS API and we used it to add Rates, Destinations and define DestinationRates.

In this post, we’ll create the RatingPlan that references the DestinationRate we just defined, and the RatingProfile that references the RatingPlan, and then, as the cherry on top – We’ll rate some calls.

For anyone looking at the above diagram for the first time, you might be inclined to ask why what is the purpose of having all these layers?

This layered architecture allows all sorts of flexibility, that we wouldn’t otherwise have, for example, we can have multiple RatingPlans defined for the same Destinations, to allow us to have different Products defined, with different destinations and costs.

Likewise we can have multiple RatingProfiles assigned for the same destinations to allow us to generate multiple CDRs for each call, for example a CDR to bill the customer with and a CDR with our wholesale cost.

All this flexibility is enabled by the layered architecture.

Define RatingPlan

Picking up where we left off having just defined the DestinationRate, we’ll need to create a RatingPlan and link it to the DestinationRate, so let’s check on our DestinationRates:

print("GetTPRatingProfileIds: ")
TPRatingProfileIds = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "ApierV1.GetRatingProfileIDs", "params": [{"TPid": "cgrates.org"}]})
print("TPRatingProfileIds: ")
pprint.pprint(TPRatingProfileIds)

From the output we can see we’ve got the DestinationRate defined, there’s a lot of info returned (I’ve left out most of it), but you can see the Destination, and the Rate associated with it is returned:

OrderedDict([('id', 1),
             ('result',
              OrderedDict([('TPid', 'cgrates.org'),
                           ('ID', 'DestinationRate_AU'),
                           ('DestinationRates',
                            [OrderedDict([('DestinationId', 'Dest_AU_Fixed'),
                                          ('RateId', 'Rate_AU_Fixed_Rate_1'),
                                          ('Rate', None),
                                          ('RoundingMethod', '*up'),
                                          ('RoundingDecimals', 4),
                                          ('MaxCost', 0),
                                          ('MaxCostStrategy', '')]),
                             OrderedDict([('DestinationId', 'Dest_AU_Mobile'),
                                          ('RateId', 'Rate_AU_Mobile_Rate_1'),
                                          ('Rate', None),
                                          ...

So after confirming that our DestinationRates are there, we’ll create a RatingPlan to reference it, for this we’ll use the APIerSv1.SetTPRatingPlan API call.

TPRatingPlans = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({
    "id": 3,
    "method": "APIerSv1.SetTPRatingPlan",
    "params": [
        {
            "TPid": "cgrates.org",
            "ID": "RatingPlan_VoiceCalls",
            "RatingPlanBindings": [
                {
                    "DestinationRatesId": "DestinationRate_AU",
                    "TimingId": "*any",
                    "Weight": 10
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
})

RatingPlan_VoiceCalls = CGRateS_Obj.SendData(
    {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "ApierV1.GetTPRatingPlanIds", "params": [{"TPid": "cgrates.org"}]})
print("RatingPlan_VoiceCalls: ")
pprint.pprint(RatingPlan_VoiceCalls)
print("\n\n\n")

In our basic example, this really just glues the DestinationRate_AU object to RatingPlan_VoiceCalls.

It’s worth noting that you can use a RatingPlan to link to multiple DestinationRates, for example, we might want to have a different RatingPlan for each region / country, we can do that pretty easily too, in the below example I’ve referenced other Destination Rates (You’d go about defining the DestinationRates for these other destinations / rates the same way as we did in the last example).

{
    "id": 3,
    "method": "APIerSv1.SetTPRatingPlan",
    "params": [
        {
            "TPid": "cgrates.org",
            "ID": "RatingPlan_VoiceCalls",
            "RatingPlanBindings": [
                {
                    "DestinationRatesId": "DestinationRate_USA",
                    "TimingId": "*any",
                    "Weight": 10
                },
                    "DestinationRatesId": "DestinationRate_UK",
                    "TimingId": "*any",
                    "Weight": 10
                },
                    "DestinationRatesId": "DestinationRate_AU",
                    "TimingId": "*any",
                    "Weight": 10
                },
                ...

One last step before we can test this all end-to-end, and that’s to link the RatingPlan we just defined with a RatingProfile.

StorDB & DataDB

Psych! Before we do that, I’m going to subject you to learning about backends for a while.

So far we’ve skirted around CGrateS architecture, but this is something we need to know for now.

To keep everything fast, a lot of data is cached in what is called a DataDB (if you’ve followed since part 1, then your DataDB is Redis, but there are other options).

To keep everything together, databases are used for storage, called StorDB (in our case we are using MySQL, but again, we can have other options) but calls to this database are minimal to keep the system fast.

If you’re an astute reader, you may have noticed many of our API calls have TP in method name, if the API call has TP in the name, it is storing it in the StoreDB, if it doesn’t, it means it’s storing it only in DataDB.

Why does this matter? Well, let’s look a little more closely and it will become clear:

ApierV1.SetRatingProfile will set the data only in DataDB (Redis), because it’s in the DataDB the change will take effect immediately.

ApierV1.SetTPRatingProfile will set the data only in StoreDB (MySQL), it will not take effect until it is copied from the database (StoreDB) to the cache (DataDB).

To do this we need to run:

cgr-console "load_tp_from_stordb Tpid=\"cgrates.org\" Cleanup=true Validate=true DisableDestinations=false"

Which pulls the data from the database into the cache, as you may have guessed there’s also an API call for this:

{"method":"APIerSv1.LoadTariffPlanFromStorDb","params":[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","DryRun":False,"Validate":True,"APIOpts":None,"Caching":None}],"id":0}

After we define the RatingPlan, we need to run this command prior to creating the RatingProfile, so it has something to reference, so we’ll do that by adding:

print(CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"APIerSv1.LoadTariffPlanFromStorDb","params":[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","DryRun":False,"Validate":True,"APIOpts":None,"Caching":None}],"id":0}))

Now, on with the show!

Defining a RatingProfile

The last piece of the puzzle to define is the RatingProfile.

We define a few key things in the rating profile:

• The Tenant – CGrateS is multitenant out of the box (in our case we’ve used tenant named “cgrates.org“, but you could have different tenants for different customers).
• The Category – As we covered in the first post, CGrateS can bill voice calls, SMS, MMS & Data consumption, in this scenario we’re billing calls so we have the value set to *call, but we’ve got many other options. We can use Category to link what RatingPlan is used, for example we might want to offer a premium voice service with guaranteed CLI rates, using a different RatingPlan that charges more per call, or maybe we’re doing mobile and we want a different RatingPlan for use when Roaming, we can use Category to switch that.
• The Subject – This is loosely the Source / Calling Party; in our case we’re using a wildcard value *any which will match any Subject
• The RatingPlanActivations list the RatingPlanIds of the RatingPlans this RatingProfile uses

So let’s take a look at what we’d run to add this:

#Reload data from StorDB
print(CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"APIerSv1.LoadTariffPlanFromStorDb","params":[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","DryRun":False,"Validate":True,"APIOpts":None,"Caching":None}],"id":0}))

#Create RatingProfile
print(CGRateS_Obj.SendData({
    "method": "APIerSv1.SetRatingProfile",
    "params": [
        {
            "TPid": "RatingProfile_VoiceCalls",
            "Overwrite": True,
            "LoadId" : "APItest",
            "Tenant": "cgrates.org",
            "Category": "call",
            "Subject": "*any",
            "RatingPlanActivations": [
                {
                    "ActivationTime": "2014-01-14T00:00:00Z",
                    "RatingPlanId": "RatingPlan_VoiceCalls",
                    "FallbackSubjects": ""
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}))

print("GetTPRatingProfileIds: ")
TPRatingProfileIds = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "ApierV1.GetRatingProfileIDs", "params": [{"TPid": "cgrates.org"}]})
print("TPRatingProfileIds: ")
pprint.pprint(TPRatingProfileIds)

Okay, so at this point, all going well, we should have some data loaded, we’ve gone through all those steps to load this data, so now let’s simulate a call to a Mobile Number (22c per minute) for 123 seconds.

We can do this from the CLI:

cgr-console 'cost Category="call" Tenant="cgrates.org" Subject="1001" Destination="6140000" AnswerTime="2025-08-04T13:00:00Z" Usage="123s"'

We should get the cost back of 66 cents, as 3x 22 cents.

If that’s worked, breath a sigh of relief. That’s the worst done.*

As you may have guessed we can also check this through API calls,

print("Testing call..")
cdr = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method": "APIerSv1.GetCost", "params": [ { \
    "Tenant": "cgrates.org", \
    "Category": "call", \
    "Subject": "1001", \
    "AnswerTime": "2025-08-04T13:00:00Z", \
    "Destination": "6140000", \
    "Usage": "123s", \
    "APIOpts": {}
    }], "id": 0})
pprint.pprint(cdr)

And you should get the same output.

If you’ve had issues with this, I’ve posted a copy of the code in GitHub.

We’re done here. Well done. This one was a slog.

In our last post we dipped a toe into CGrateS.

We cheated a fair bit, to show something that worked, but it’s not something you’d probably want to use in real life, loading static CSV files gets us off the ground, but in reality we don’t want to manage a system through CSV files.

Instead, we’d want to use an API.

Fair warning – There is some familiarity expected with JSON and RESTful APIs required, we’ll use Python3 for our examples, but you can use any programing language you’re comfortable with, or even CURL commands.

So we’re going to start by clearing out all the data we setup in CGrateS using the cgr-loader tool from those imported CSVs:

redis-cli flushall
sudo mysql -Nse 'show tables' cgrates | while read table; do sudo mysql -e "truncate table $table" cgrates; done
cgr-migrator -exec=*set_versions -stordb_passwd=CGRateS.org
sudo systemctl restart cgrates

So what have we just done?
Well, we’ve just cleared all the data in CGrateS.
We’re starting with a blank slate.

In this post, we’re going to define some Destinations, some Rates to charge and then some DestinationRates to link each Destination to a Rate.

But this time we’ll be doing this through the CGrateS API.

Introduction to the CGrateS API

CGrateS is all API driven – so let’s get acquainted with this API.

I’ve written a simple Python wrapper you can find here that will make talking to CGRateS a little easier, so let’s take it for a spin and get the Destinations that are loaded into our system:

import cgrateshttpapi
CGRateS_Obj = cgrateshttpapi.CGRateS('172.16.41.133', 2080) #Replace this IP with the IP Address of your CGrateS instance...

destinations = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV1.GetTPDestinationIDs','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org"}]})['result']

#Pretty print the result:
print("Destinations: ")
pprint.pprint(destinations)

All going well you’ll see something like this back:

Initializing with host 172.16.41.133 on port 2080
Sending Request with Body:
{'method': 'ApierV2.Ping', 'params': [{'Tenant': 'cgrates.org'}]}
Sending Request with Body:
{'method': 'ApierV2.GetTPDestinationIDs', 'params': [{"TPid":"cgrates.org"}]}
Destinations from CGRates: []

So what did we just do?
Well, we sent a JSON formatted string to the CGRateS API at 172.16.41.133 on port 2080 – You’ll obviously need to change this to the IP of your CGrateS instance.

In the JSON body we sent we asked for all the Destinations using the ApierV1.GetTPDestinationIDs method, for the TPid ‘cgrates.org’,

And it looks like no destinations were sent back, so let’s change that!

Note: There’s API Version 1 and API Version 2, not all functions exist in both (at least not in the docs) so you have to use a mix.

Adding Destinations via the API

So now we’ve got our API setup, let’s see if we can add a destination!

To add a destination, we’ll need to go to the API guide and find the API call to add a destination – in our case the API call is ApierV2.SetTPDestination and will look like this:

{'method': 'ApierV2.SetTPDestination', 'params': [
    {"TPid": "cgrates.org", "ID": "Dest_AU_Mobile",
        "Prefixes": ["614"]}]}

So we’re creating a Destination named Dest_AU_Mobile and Prefix 614 will match this destination.

Note: I like to prefix all my Destinations with Dest_, all my rates with Rate_, etc, so it makes it easy when reading what’s going on what object is what, you may wish to do the same!

So we’ll use the Python code we had before to list the destinations, but this time, we’ll use the ApierV2.SetTPDestination API call to add a destination before listing them, let’s take a look:

import cgrateshttpapi
import pprint
import sys
CGRateS_Obj = cgrateshttpapi.CGRateS('172.16.41.133', 2080)

CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV2.SetTPDestination','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","ID":"Dest_AU_Mobile","Prefixes":["614"]}]})

destinations = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV1.GetTPDestinationIDs','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org"}]})['result']
print("Destinations: ")
pprint.pprint(destinations)
print("\n\n\n")

Now if you run the code you’ll see something like this:

Initializing with host 172.16.41.133 on port 2080
Sending Request with Body:

Sending Request with Body:
{'method': 'ApierV2.SetTPDestination', 'params': [{'TPid': 'cgrates.org', 'ID': 'Dest_AU_Mobile', 'Prefixes': ['614']}]}

{'method': 'ApierV1.GetTPDestinationIDs', 'params': [{'TPid': 'cgrates.org'}]}
Destinations: 
['Dest_AU_Mobile']

Boom! There’s our added destination, le’s add a few more using the same process, so we’ve got a few other destinations defined:

CGRateS_Obj = cgrateshttpapi.CGRateS('172.16.41.133', 2080)

CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV2.SetTPDestination','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","ID":"Dest_AU_Fixed","Prefixes":["612", "613", "617", "618"]}]})
CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV2.SetTPDestination','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","ID":"Dest_AU_Mobile","Prefixes":["614"]}]})
CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV2.SetTPDestination','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org","ID":"Dest_AU_TollFree","Prefixes":["6113", "6118"]}]})



print("Destinations: ")
for destination in destinations:
    destination = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({'method':'ApierV1.GetTPDestination','params':[{"TPid":"cgrates.org", "ID" : str(destination)}]})['result']
    pprint.pprint(destination)
print("\n\n\n")
sys.exit()

After adding some prettier printing and looping through all the destinations, here’s what your destinations should look like:

OrderedDict([('TPid', 'cgrates.org'),
             ('ID', 'Dest_AU_Fixed'),
             ('Prefixes', ['612', '613', '617', '618'])])

OrderedDict([('TPid', 'cgrates.org'),
             ('ID', 'Dest_AU_Mobile'),
             ('Prefixes', ['614'])])

OrderedDict([('TPid', 'cgrates.org'),
             ('ID', 'Dest_AU_TollFree'),
             ('Prefixes', ['6113', '6118'])])

Notice for AU Fixed, we defined multiple prefixes under the same Destination? Just as items in the list.

So we’ve created a bunch of Destinations, like so:

Next let’s create some rates which we can then associate with these destinations.

Adding Rates via the API

So to begin with let’s see if we’ve got any rates defined, we can do this with another API call, this time the ApierV1.GetTPRateIds call.

{"method":"ApierV1.GetTPRateIds","params":[{"TPid":"cgrates.org"}]}

And at the moment that returns no results, so let’s add some rates.

For this we’ll use the ApierV1.SetTPRate function:

{"method":"ApierV1.SetTPRate","params":[{"ID":"Rate_AU_Mobile_Rate_1","TPid":"cgrates.org","RateSlots":[{"ConnectFee":0,"Rate":22,"RateUnit":"60s","RateIncrement":"60s","GroupIntervalStart":"0s"}]}],"id":1}

If we post this to the CGR engine, we’ll create a rate, named Rate_AU_Mobile_Rate_1 that bills 22 cents per minute, charged every 60 seconds.

Let’s add a few rates:

CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"ApierV1.SetTPRate","params":[{"ID":"Rate_AU_Mobile_Rate_1","TPid":"cgrates.org","RateSlots":[{"ConnectFee":0,"Rate":22,"RateUnit":"60s","RateIncrement":"60s","GroupIntervalStart":"0s"}]}],"id":1})
CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"ApierV1.SetTPRate","params":[{"ID":"Rate_AU_Fixed_Rate_1","TPid":"cgrates.org","RateSlots":[{"ConnectFee":0,"Rate":14,"RateUnit":"60s","RateIncrement":"60s","GroupIntervalStart":"0s"}]}],"id":1})
CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"ApierV1.SetTPRate","params":[{"ID":"Rate_AU_Toll_Free_Rate_1","TPid":"cgrates.org","RateSlots":[{"ConnectFee":25,"Rate":0,"RateUnit":"60s","RateIncrement":"60s","GroupIntervalStart":"0s"}]}],"id":1})

TPRateIds = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method":"ApierV1.GetTPRateIds","params":[{"TPid":"cgrates.org"}]})['result']
print(TPRateIds)
for TPRateId in TPRateIds:
    print("\tRate: " + str(TPRateId))

All going well, when you add the above, we’ll have added 3 new rates:

Linking Rates to Destinations

So now with Destinations defined, and Rates defined, it’s time to link these two together!

Destination Rates link our Destinations and Route rates, this decoupling means that we can have one Rate shared by multiple Destinations if we wanted, and makes things very flexible.

For this example, we’re going to map the Destinations to rates like this:

So let’s go about making this link in CGrateS, for this we’ll use the ApierV1.SetTPDestinationRate method to add the DestinationRate, and the ApierV1.GetTPDestinationRateIds to get the list of them.

CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method": "ApierV1.SetTPDestinationRate", "params": \
    [{"ID": "DestinationRate_AU", "TPid": "cgrates.org", "DestinationRates": \
        [ {"DestinationId": "Dest_AU_Fixed", "RateId": "Rate_AU_Fixed_Rate_1", "Rate": None, "RoundingMethod": "*up", "RoundingDecimals": 4, "MaxCost": 0, "MaxCostStrategy": ""} ]\
    }]})

TPDestinationRates = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"ApierV1.GetTPDestinationRateIds","params":[{"TPid":"cgrates.org"}]})['result']
for TPDestinationRate in TPDestinationRates:
    pprint.pprint(TPDestinationRate)

All going well, you’ll see the new DestinationRate we added.

Here’s a good chance to show how we can add multiple bits of data in one API call, we can tweak the ApierV1.SetTPDestinationRate method and include all the DestinationRates we need in one API call:

CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"method": "ApierV1.SetTPDestinationRate", "params": [
        {"ID": "DestinationRate_AU", "TPid": "cgrates.org", "DestinationRates": [ \
            {"DestinationId": "Dest_AU_Fixed", "RateId": "Rate_AU_Fixed_Rate_1", "Rate": None, "RoundingMethod": "*up", "RoundingDecimals": 4, "MaxCost": 0, "MaxCostStrategy": ""},\
            {"DestinationId": "Dest_AU_Mobile", "RateId": "Rate_AU_Mobile_Rate_1", "Rate": None, "RoundingMethod": "*up", "RoundingDecimals": 4, "MaxCost": 0, "MaxCostStrategy": ""}, \
            {"DestinationId": "Dest_AU_TollFree", "RateId": "Rate_AU_Toll_Free_Rate_1", "Rate": None, "RoundingMethod": "*up", "RoundingDecimals": 4, "MaxCost": 0, "MaxCostStrategy": ""}\
     ]},
    ]})

As we’ve only created one DestinationRate, let’s take a look at the detail:

TPDestinationRate = CGRateS_Obj.SendData({"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"ApierV1.GetTPDestinationRate","params":[{"ID":"DestinationRate_AU","TPid":"cgrates.org"}],"id":1})
pprint.pprint(TPDestinationRate)

Phew, okay, if you made it this far, congratulations.

So where we stand now is we’ve created Rates, Destinations and tied the two together.

I’ve put a copy of all the Python code on GitHub here, in case you’re having issues you can work with that.

In our next post, we’ll keep working our way up this diagram, by creating RatingPlans and RatingProfiles to reference the DestinationRate we just created.