A J2EE Application for Process Accounting, LPAR Accounting, and Transaction Accounting

Accounting is critical for information technology budgeting and chargeback. Traditional accounting in UNIX/Linux systems is known as process accounting, in which an accounting record is created when a process ends. System administrators then aggregate accounting records based on individual users, groups, or projects. As Web and application servers as well as databases handle requests and transactions for multiple entities in various Web applications and services, LPAR accounting and transaction accounting become increasingly critical for service providers in shared resource environments. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a J2EE accounting application for resource usage metering. For process accounting the resulting system can generate usage reports by projects, by groups, by users, by commands, or by a combination of these identifiers. For dynamically changing partitions it generates reports for shared resources including CPUs, memories, disks, file systems, and network interfaces. For transaction accounting it generates reports based on account classes provided that applications are instrumented. It is the first known J2EE accounting application for UNIX/Linux transaction accounting.