An Information Model for Metering and Accounting

Various service provider models have evolved in the IT industry during the last few years. Service providers build and manage infrastructure for supplying value-added services to their customers that vary from managing their basic IT operations, to running complex business processes. The complexity of the hardware and software systems deployed in service provider infrastructure requires efficient management tools and automation. These tools assist the administrators in tasks such as resource provisioning, capacity planning, charging, fault detection etc.

Automation enables the infrastructure to be `self-managed'. Moreover, being the owners of the infrastructure, the service providers have access to huge amounts of management data that they could analyze and use to their advantage resulting in better managed systems and tremendous cost savings. Services offered by service providers require usage metering and accounting so that the consumer can be charged. It may also be required for studying usage patterns, resource provisioning, quota allocations, etc. In this paper, we present an information model that captures critical management information needed by applications to enable usage accounting of service provider's resources. We propose extensions to DMTF Common Information Model's Metrics schema and introduce a new schema for metering and accounting.

By: Vikas Agarwal, Neeran Karnik, Arun Kumar

Published in: RI03003 in 2003

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