RA

RA is the affordable OpenVMS Resource Accounting system. RA tracks resources used on your OpenVMS system so you can later chargeback costs to your users.

Resources

RA allows collection information on the following resources:
CPU (up to 9 different classes)
Connect Time (up to 4 different connect rates)
Direct IO's
Buffered IO's
Disk space
Pages printed
Tapes mounts

Projects

RA also allows you to track resources by project. This allows you to consolidate resource usage for various users into "logical" groups, which appeals to your managers.

Charges

RA allows you to assign charge rates for any of the resources collected. With RA you can also:
assign minimum and maximum charges
assign batch discounts
specify different charge rates for prime & nonprime
specify volume discounts by total charge and/or disk charge

Reports

RA has many different reports you can use to analyze and/or charge for your system's resource usage. Below is a summary of the different types of reports. Most of these reports allow you to report by user, account, project, UIC, and user defined groups. Reports can be generated for individual nodes or for a group of combined nodes. Reports available include:
Invoice / Detail reports
Summary reports
Cost Distribution reports
System Resource report
Revenue report

New features in RA Version 6 and RA Version 7

The number of CPU classes has been increased from 3 to 9.
A cost distribution report has been added. This report takes a fixed dollar amount and divides among the accounts on the system according to their percentage of the total resource usage. The report has two versions. A summary with totals per cost centre and the calculated chargeback amount or a detailed report with 1 line for each user in the cost centre and totals. Cost centres can be:
The first n characters of the account name
UIC Group
User-defined groups
A new export report has been added. The output of this report is a delimited ASCII text file that is suitable for importing into most relationship database packages or graphing packages. With this raw data it is simple to create graphs and user designed reports using many popular 3rd party packages. The new logical names RA$NOHEADER and RA$DELIMITER can be used to help control the contents of this report. Users can export all data fields or configure the export to include only the fields they require.
The current 2-page user report generated for individual users or projects can now also be generated for accounts and user defined groups.
The revenue report includes all accounts based on the value stored in the revenue field in the client file. A third revenue class, I, has been added. Accounts marked "I" will be ignored and not included in the revenue report.
The client file now includes two additional fields. A minimum charge and a maximum charge for a user. If these values are used they will be taken into account whenever that user is included in a report.
The write routine that creates accounting save files has been rewritten. Prior to V6 it would save RA's entire summary data tables regardless of how much information was actually in the table. RA will now save only that portion of the table which contains data. In many cases this results in RA save files that are significantly smaller than in previous versions.
RA can now be configured to collect disk usage on up to 200 disks.
The RA_COM:CREATE_DISK_FILE.COM procedure now prompts for a multiplier. This multiplier was added to help deal with shadow disks. Since shadow set disks do not have a "D" prefix the procedure does not see them. They may be added to the DISKNAMES.DAT file manually or this multiplier may be used when adding the main disk to indicate that it is shadowed and multiply the disk usage detected by the specified amount. This eliminates the need to run an analyze/disk/usage on a disk that is nearly identical to a disk that has already been scanned. The default value is 1, indicating that the disk is not shadowed; however 2 or 3 can be entered.
RA and VDM disk data collection can now be done by the same procedure, eliminating the need to scan disks once for each product. The new command procedures, CREATE_COMBINED_DISKNAMES, SAIGA_DISK_COLLECTION.APD and COMBINED_AUTOSUBMIT are used to set this up.
A new /GROUP qualifier has been added. It can be used to control which group(s) are included in a group detail report.
Internal variables are now floating point to help eliminate overflow conditions.
The summary report has been replaced with a report generator. Summary reports can be created with your choice of columns in username, account, UIC, UIC group    or user group sequence. Individual columns can also be scaled by 1,000 or 1,000,000 to help control the report size
It is now possible to add image level charges to RA. Used in conjunction with the /accounting qualifier in the install utility it is now possible to charge users for running specific images without enabling image accounting.
RA has a new utility program that allows you to add fixed charges to a session at the DCL level. Privileged users can add charges for other accounts as well. This utility allows sites to add fixed usage charges into DCL driven menu systems; a frequently requested enhancement. All RA reports have been modified, as needed, to accommodate these fixed charges and image charges.
New reports are available providing details for fixed and image charges.
The way that many RA reports are requested at the DCL level has been changed. Where possible the old way to create a report is still supported but users should make changes to their DCL procedures where necessary.

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