🚀 go-pugleaf

      Systems Programmer
      University Computing Facilities




I haven't seen anybody talking about PMA/Chargeback. I realize that

the very name "Computer Associates" invokes responses of fear and loathing

from many of you out there however, we have found the flexibility of this

product to be very accomodating. It is a database application, with all of

your chargeback definitions defined online, then stored in various tables

for reference during charge calculation. PMA/Chargeback is just that.

Chargeback. You will need to find some meaningful way to summarize your

SMF data before passing it to PMA. PMA's front end Data Manager let's

you pass virtually kind of record to PMA/Chargeback as long as you

tell PMA what it's going to look like. You will also be responsible for

writing applications to produce reports on the data stored in the

charges table. We have found SAS ACCESS for DB2 to be very useful for this.

You can also use QMF or some other online query facility to produce

applications that give your users virtually instaneous online access to

their charges. We are currently using JARS to front-end PMA/Chargeback but

want to move to MXG to summarize our SMF data down to the user/resource

level, then let the charging algorithms in PMA/Chargeback take over.

The things I like best are: Online charge algorithm definition
                            Database-type access to charge info