An Advanced Accounting Service for AIX Systems

Resource usage is important input for a number of IT processes including those related to: financial management, capacity planning; service level management; and configuration management. Accounting systems in traditional UNIX/Linux environments generate a usage record at the end of each process. Administrators periodically use standard accounting system utilities to summarize resource usage using the user and application data recorded with each of these records. Recent advances in dynamic LPAR technologies and service oriented architectures have placed new requirements on the metering of resource usage. In a Dynamic LPAR environment, allocations must be measured and processed to obtain accurate information on resource usage. Transactions performed using service oriented architectures deployed on heterogeneous, distributed systems introduce new challenges for metering resource usage based on transaction classes. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a J2EE-based accounting service which exposes manageability and reporting interfaces for the AIX advanced accounting system. The reporting interface can be used to generate process-based, LPAR-based and transaction-based usage reports.