topic Re: System Billing in Operating System - HP-UX

System Billing

SSP_1 — Tue, 14 May 2002 12:39:34 GMT

Hi,
I have a production box. There is a oracle 8.1.7 instance installed on to it and it consists of some modules eg. HR, Finance, MATC. If I have to bill these module leaders , how to do it? What I know is we can start system accounting . So with system accounting enabled, can I acquire logs of 1)Total time system used by a particular unix login, 2) Total time a process was utilizing the system.

Regards

Re: System Billing

Stefan Farrelly — Tue, 14 May 2002 12:44:08 GMT

Process accounting will give you the info you seek, but at the cost of a small overhead to system performance and you will need plenty of diskspace to hold the logs which will grow rapidly.

Anyway, how are you going to differentiate between HR, Finance etc ? Do they connect via different TCP ports ? or do they use the same Oracle listener port (which means you can differentiate this way). Does each application connect to a different database ? if so this makes your accounting/billing easier. If not you will probably have to do the accounting from withing the database - which means your DBA will have to do it.

Re: System Billing

MANOJ SRIVASTAVA — Tue, 14 May 2002 12:52:30 GMT

Hi Shripad

I was involved in a similar exrcise and we devloped some salient rules to develop an internal billing system for differnt depts in terms of CPU usage and Disk Usage etc etc.
The guidelines look something like this.

1. Uptime in terms of system availablity .
2. Enable Process accounting for the Users and then print report in terms of systems usage actual cpu time usage, disk Usage.
3. Disable direct logins to Oracle , MIS etc and have the user su to them , thus maintian a sulog which shows how long a person used the system.
4. Database uptime reports.
5. No. of activations , bills sent

etc etc

Manoj Srivastava

Re: System Billing

SSP_1 — Tue, 14 May 2002 12:57:02 GMT

Hi,

I just wann to trace how much time [in minutes] a system is been used by a particular unix login . And also system utilization [in minutes] per process.

Re: System Billing

Stefan Farrelly — Tue, 14 May 2002 13:00:33 GMT

Then all you need to do is switch on process accounting. This will log all processes, when they start, end, and run/cpu time.

Re: System Billing

Tom Geudens — Tue, 14 May 2002 13:01:53 GMT

Hi,
Besides the point maybe, but we use MeasureWare for this purpose. Very easy to define which processes belong where ...
The "other" part is divided between the groups based on the usage we can define (which is maybe not fair, but that's life :-).

Hope this helps,
Tom