A method is provided in one example embodiment and includes causing generation of a metered record associated with a metering event of an application executed within a cloud-based computing system, the metered record including a metering attribute and a corresponding value, the corresponding value being determined substantially simultaneous to a runtime execution of the application, and facilitating searching for the metered record based on the metering attribute and the corresponding value of the metering attribute. In specific embodiments, the metered record is communicated using a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API). In an example embodiment, the notification of the metering event can be received by any one of a REST API, a Java Messaging Service listener, an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) listener, or a metering plugin.