Pipeline, environment, and other usage pings should report incremental not cumulative
I'm not sure we need to change the data reporting itself, but the Redash graphs for usage pings should generally not show cumulative usage and it's completely misleading and has confused several people already. Unfortunately, the data itself looks suspect since it goes up and down, which should never happen for cumulative data. Now, people could be disabling usage pings or terminating instances, which would result in downward numbers, but the magnitude of the downward numbers implies something else is going on. I know I've seen some licensed installs reporting oscillating numbers, which to me implied they had multiple servers using the same license, each with different usage, and so we'd see values ping-pong between the instances.
Regardless of the problem, detangling the true incremental usage is really hard once it's been aggregated like this. We'd have to look at a per-instance level, and then aggregate, and remove cases where the repot is no longer there.
Another way to handle it would be to have instances report deltas themselves. Perhaps report cumulative, but also report the number of objects created within the last week.
/cc @victorwu @bikebilly