Introduction to the Advanced Accounting subsystem

The Advanced Accounting subsystem, hereafter referred to as Advanced Accounting, is based on mainframe technology and features interval accounting, data aggregation, and dynamic classification of accounting data. You can customize Advanced Accounting for different computing environments. You can configure Advanced Accounting to produce the specific types of records needed for billing applications.

Advanced Accounting provides usage-based information for a wide variety of system resources so that you can develop comprehensive charge-back strategies. You can collect accounting data on resources such as disks, network interfaces, virtual devices, file systems, processors, and memory. Interval accounting gives you the ability to view this data over system administrator-defined time intervals in order to develop chronological views. This has several potential applications, including capacity planning.

Advanced Accounting also provides new statistics from previous accounting tools. For example, the process record provides microsecond-level CPU times, a memory integral based on elapsed time (standard UNIX accounting bases it on CPU times), local and distributed logical file I/O, and local and remote socket I/O.

Interval accounting can be used to periodically record accounting data, enabling the production of more accurate bills. You can configure Advanced Accounting to produce intermediate process records for active processes. These records can be added to the completed process records to produce a bill that reflects the total use of system resources.

Data aggregation is a way to control the amount of data written to a data file. This helps system performance by reducing the overall resource load needed to run Advanced Accounting. Aggregation minimizes a system's I/O requirements, adding accounting records so that fewer records are written to the accounting file. It is transparent to applications and middleware.

Policies are rules that provide for the automatic classification of processes. Classification is done according to users, groups, and applications, categorizing the use of system resources by billable entities. These categories are called projects.

APIs are provided so that applications and middleware can describe the transactional nature of their workloads, enabling charge-backs for server processes. These APIs are intended to define and delineate transactions and to identify the end user, if possible. Advanced Accounting measures the resource use of transactions, if possible, and records all of this information in the accounting file.