This section shows you how RA can help analyze and track resource usage, pinpoint waste and charge users for the resources they use on your Alpha AXP and VAX systems. You can charge for connect time, CPU usage, disk storage, buffered I/Os, direct I/Os, tape mounts and printer pages. You can charge more during the day than at night or on weekends. You can charge more for interactive usage than for batch usage. You can print invoices as well as daily, weekly and monthly reports by user, account and project. RA helps you pinpoint bottlenecks and improve system performance. It helps you do your job better and makes your life easier.
Here are six ways RA can help you:
1. Charge users for resource usage
RA records resource usage, calculates costs, creates a total dollar amount and prints an invoice you can mail to your users.
2. Reduce waste
Charging for resource usage makes users aware of resource costs. With that knowledge and a little education from you, they can use the system more effectively. For example, they can run jobs in batch during off-hours rather than interactively during the day.
3. Identify heavy users
With RA, you can determine which users consume the most of any resource. Based on that, you can identify problems and help them make more effective use of your system.
4. Allocate resource usage to projects
RA allows you to allocate resource usage to projects rather than individual users. This allows you to consolidate dozens of separate resource usage amounts into "logical" groups which make sense to your managers.
5. Record disk usage
RA records allocated disk space by UIC, calculates costs and analyzes usage by drive. Using this information, you can more effectively manage your disk drives.
6. Summarize resource usage
RA provides a "snapshot" single page summary of resource use for a day, a week or a month. This is an effective tool to help you manage your system.
With RA, you can:
- collect resource usage data
- analyze resource usage
- charge for resource usage
The next three pages of this section describe these tasks in more detail.
Collecting resource usage data
RA collects data every night using two batch procedures. Since they are self-submitting, data collection normally runs every night without further operator action.
The first data collection procedure summarizes disk usage by UIC and writes entries into the OpenVMS accounting file. It is normally run on only one node in a cluster and is called ACC_DAY_UPDATE_NODE.COM.
The second batch procedure extracts all the records for that day on that node and adds them to the RA month-to-date file for that node. Then it scans its accounting file and creates a summary file which you can use to generate reports the next morning. This transfers disk-intensive processing to a period of low activity and reduces load during the day. This procedure is run on every node and is called ACC_SUMMARY_NODE.COM.
You can print any number of standard reports every day as part of the data collection procedure. They will be waiting on your desk when you get in.
To avoid conflict with site-specific applications, you can specify what time the data collection procedure is to start as well as the batch queue it is to use.
You can specify which disk drives to be included in the data collection procedure.
During data collection and reporting, users and UICs without records in the client master and/or System Authorization File (SYSUAF) in case corrective action needs to be taken to update the client master or SYSUAF files.
Refer to the section "Collecting data" for more details on the data collection process.
Automatic
RA is an automatic tool to help you control resource usage on your system. Once you define your site-specific parameters, it collects data, creates summaries and generates standard reports automatically without making any further demands on your time. It's like having an assistant who works 24 hours a day and always follows orders. Analyzing resource usage
RA gives you summary and detail reports by user, account, project, UIC and user-defined groups. You specify which month's data you want to analyze. Then, you generate daily, weekly or monthly reports by specifying a range of dates to be included. You can apply discounts or omit them. You can select groups of users, accounts or projects using wildcards. You can select prime, non-prime or both types of usage. You can select interactive, batch or both modes of execution. You can specify minimum and maximum charges for specific users.
Fixed Costs (/report=fixed) New to Version 7 of RA the fixed costs report can be generated for all users or a single user by adding the /user=username qualifier. This report shows all fixed costs that have been incurred by the user(s) within the time period covered by the RA data save file. Since any fixed costs incurred outside the period covered by this data are not included in this, or any other report, it is recommended that the ra_montly_charge procedure that records fixed cost values entered in individual user records in the client.dat file be run monthly after the 1st day of the month. This report is primarily used as backup for the fixed charges included in other RA reports.
Image (/report=image) New to Version 7 of RA the image reports can be generated in username or image sequence to provide details of image charges as backup to the other RA reports. This report shows all image charges for a username (/sequence=user) or all users with charges for a particular image (/sequence=image). For images to be properly charged they must be installed with the /account qualifier; see the section on “Charging for specific images” on page for further information.
Invoices (/report=detail) You can generate an overview of resource usage by user. This two page report serves as the invoice and is produced in a normal sales invoice format. Billing and mailing names and addresses are printed at the top. Following that, resource usage is summarized along with charge rates and total charges by resource. The total charge for the user as well as discounts are displayed at the bottom of the second page. Each user starts on a new page so the invoices can be separated and mailed. This report can also be generated by account, user-defined group and project.
Summary Reports (/report=summary) You can generate a summary of resource usage by user, account, user-defined group, project, UIC or UIC group. There is one line for each entity showing all the data items that were requested in the summary report specification file. These files, new with V7 of RA, allows users to customize the summary and export reports to include only the items of interest to their sites, in any order they prefer. All data items are available; resource and charge amounts. Using this report, you can scan usage to pinpoint possible problems. All summary reports use the ra_dat:default_summary.spc specification file unless the /specification=file qualifier is used to supply a different file.
Account Revenue Analysis (/report=revenue) You can summarize processing charges (CPU, connect time, etc.) versus disk charges by account and within each account, by user. This shows you the split between disk storage charges and the total of other resource charges. Individual users in the client file can be marked as revenue or non-revenue accounts or they can be marked as “ignored” and excluded from this report.
Cost Distribution Reports; Detailed or Summary (/report=cost_detail, /report=cost_summary or /report=cost_user) You can allocate a fixed cost for your data centre and generate a report that indicates what portion of total resource usage each account and site is responsible for. The detailed report shows all accounts broken into sites and the summary report shows just one line per site. Now you can charge each account/site a fair amount for IS usage based on their portion of the total usage. A site is defined as the first n characters of the account name from the SYSUAF. You can control how many characters are used to define a site using the RA_ACC_WIDTH logical. These reports can also be generated by UIC group or by user-defined groups; each UIC group or user-defined group will be treated as a cost-center.
System Resource Summary (/report=resource) You can generate a one-page summary showing the system utilization such as total sessions, number of login failures and disk utilization. This report summarizes system usage by resource rather than user or account. This shows job statistics, disk usage and dollar volume charged for each resource. Using this report you can answer such questions as "What percentage of our total billing is disk?" and "Are we breaking even on printer paper based on our current charges?".
Project Analysis (/sequence=project) You can generate reports by project in the same format as the invoice report, show each user in a project in the same format as the invoice report or a project summary report. Use /report=detail or /report=summary.
Trace Report (/report=trace) You can generate a detailed list of the accounting records for a single user. You can use this report to track down billing problems or examine a user's account records in detail. Only resource usage is shown; dollar amounts are not calculated or shown.
Adjustment Report (/report=adjusted) You can create invoices containing custom charges. You can enter additional discount amounts and comments as well as miscellaneous charges for one or more accounts. You can enter values before and after volume discounts.
Export Reports (/report=export) You can have RA write the contents of a save file out in an ASCII delimited format. Now you can easily import RA data into other applications and tools for reporting, graphing and additional analysis. V7 of RA allows you to export the data summarized by username, account, group, UIC or UIC group. The Export report now uses the same report generator as the summary report so you can create your own specification files that control which RA data items are exported, their format and their sequence. All Export reports use the ra_dat:default_export.spc specification file unless the /specification=file qualifier is used to supply a different file.
Group Based Reports (/sequence=group) Several RA reports can now be created based on user-defined groups. Group your users into departments, teams, specialty areas, etc. and create summary, cost distribution or detail reports based on these groups. This qualifier can be used with /report=[detail],[cost_detail],[cost_summary],[cost_user] or [summary].
UIC Based Reports (/sequence=UIC or /sequence=UIC_group) Several RA reports can now be created based on UIC or UIC groups. Now you can take advantage of the way your accounts are already organized and get reports based on these values. For /sequence=UIC you can select /report=summary and for /sequence=UIC_Group select /report=[cost_detail],[cost_summary] or [summary].
Refer to the section "Generating reports" for more information on analyzing resource usage. Charging for resource usage
You can charge for:
connect time per hour
CPU usage per second
average disk space per block
buffered I/O per thousand I/Os
direct I/O per thousand I/Os
tape mounts per mount
printer pages per page
You can charge more for faster terminals. You can define up to four speed ranges based on baud rate and specify a rate for each range.
You can charge more for faster CPUs. You can define up to nine CPU classes, specify a rate for each class and specify which class each node of your cluster is in.
You can charge more for resource usage during the day than at night or on weekends and holidays. You specify which days of the week are prime (most expensive) and within each day, which time period is prime. You can specify a list of holidays which RA considers non-prime. By default, RA considers Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to be prime. All other times are non-prime.
You can charge more for interactive usage than for batch usage by specifying a discount for batch versus interactive jobs.
You can specify different charge rates for each user, use a standard set for everyone or have groups of users with the same rates.
You can specify a minimum, maximum and, new to V7 of RA, a fixed monthly charge for each user.
You can charge for running specific programs, a new feature added with RA V7. Charge rates for an image can be defined for users, user-defined groups and accounts with charge rates for prime, interactive and noninteractive, as well as nonprime, interactive and noninteractive.
You can even add DCL level statements to menu systems to even add special charges for specific menu options, a new feature added with RA V7.
You can enter both a billing address and a mailing address for each user.
You can designate accounts as revenue (billable), overhead (non-revenue) or to be ignored (excluded from the revenue report only). For example, the account SYSTEM would normally be designated as overhead. Flagging amounts as overhead allows you to determine how much of your activity is not being billed to users. From that, you can decide how much surcharge you must put on chargeable resources to recover your overhead costs.
You can specify a discount for disk based on total number of blocks allocated and discounts based on total dollar volume for all resource usage.
RA uses a client master to store resource charge rates for users. You can list the client file by username or account. You can update charge rates in groups of records using a single command. You can create a client file automatically from your SYSUAF.DAT.
RA determines the appropriate charge rates for a user according to the following table. Anytime RA uses the DEFAULT or RA_NOCLIENT records it will print a diagnostic message.
