I was unclear in my use of the word 'CUSTOMER'. I meant your (Velocity, or IBM, or CA) customers, being the z/VM installation owner. I did not meant my customers who have linux servers that might be charged for in the future.
You are right, my customers should NEVER be able to dictate what data gets collected, only what level of privacy we must apply to that data and that must be stipulated in the Service Level Agreement. But I as the z/VM administrator (now acting as your customer although I have never used your product) should be able to select what data to collect, report on or ignore as my needs dictate. If I have no one to charge then I might not need a lot of user data collected. If I don't do much I/O, I might not need lots of DASD/TAPE statistics kept, etc. The accounting data format is definitely easier to process, but I feel it should be in the Monitor data stream even if it becomes harder to process. I like having all System Management data in one stream. Since the data MAY already be in that monitor stream, then all products that process that data should have a mechanism to collect, report and archive that data, preferably in files whose location and names are of my (z/VM System Administrator) control. A product that actually uses both data streams but has the same singular control could be a good intermediate step, but I think the long term goal of z/VM management should be to make the accounting stream obsolete. As I said, if it ever comes to charging real money for this system, I would insist that a REAL product be purchased to process whatever data necessary to do the data processing for chargeback, not necessarily the actual generation of bills. At this point, I do not think that the Performance Toolkit is sufficient for that, but I would not eliminate it from the review process yet because I haven't experimented with it enough to know exactly what data it can collect in what formats. Having just written a Rexx stage for Pipelines to extract CPU utilization by Class from RMF Workload Manager reports for a year, I do not want to try scraping user utilization data from PerfTK listings and then charge people based on those numbers. /Tom Kern /301-903-2211 ----------Original Message--------- On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:17 AM, Thomas Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Perhaps more customers will get around to using the accumulation files > of ALL monitor reduction products if the customer had more control over > what data gets saved and where. I'm trying to understand what you are wishing for here. If you are using data for charge-back the customer probably should not have control over what gets collected. You should want all data to be collected to do your checks and balance and provide confidence that it is complete and accurate. I would want to allow the customer to determine the granularity of the data (the intervals over which you add up things) but that's it. Processing accounting records is a very easy process. The volume of data is small and processing requirements are easy to predict. It is also very easy to audit such a process. If it has the right metrics for your charge-back, then it is hard to beat. As far as I know, Performance Toolkit files created from monitor data have only system-wide metrics and no per-user metrics. So I don't see how you would use that for charge-back. ESALPS performance history does have per-user usage summary with sufficiently high capture ratio, so you can use that for charge-back. The bonus would be that you can use some other metrics (like storage utilization) to refine your charge-back process. But it is harder to audit, and when used for charge-back it may require much stronger change control than you like for your performance management. My preference would be to implement both accounting and performance monitoring. It would allow you to validate the numbers obtained through independent processes, and the performance data helps to explain excessive usage when the customer disagrees about the charges. Rob -- Rob van der Heij Velocity Software http://velocitysoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
