12.0 Managing Usage Records

Moab Accounting Manager can track the usage of resources and services on your system, recording the charge and the details of the usage in a usage record. A usage record is created when a resource or service manager requests a guaranteed quote for usage, places a reservation for usage, or charges for the usage of an item. Usage records can also be created directly via UsageRecord Create (gmkusage). A refund can be invoked to credit a charge amount back to the originating account. Usage records can also be queried, modified or deleted. By default, a standard user may only query usage records attributed to them.

In a typical use case, a quote might be used to discover how much it would cost to use an item (resource or service) and to verify the user had sufficient access to the item and funds to cover the requested usage. Just before the item is about to be used, a reservation (or hold) might be placed against the user's allocated credits for the requested usage. After the usage is complete, a charge for the actual usage can be debited from their account and the reservation removed.

As is the case for other Moab Accounting Manager objects, usage records are highly customizable. One may remove most usage record properties and add new usage record properties. See Customizing Objects for examples of customizing objects.

12.1 Creating a Usage Record

In most cases, usage records will be created by the resource management system with the gquote, the greserve or the gcharge command.

However, it is also possible to create usage records directly using the gmkusage command:

gmkusage [-T usage_record_type] [-u user_name] [-g group_name] [-p project_name] [-o organization] [-c class_name] [-Q quality_of_service] [-m machine_name] [-N nodes] [-P processors] [-M memory] [-D disk] [-n network] [-t usage_duration] [-s start_time] [-e end_time] [-d description] [-X | --extension property=value[,property_name=property_value...]] [--debug] [-?, --help] [--man] [--quiet] [-v, --verbose] [-V, --version] {[-J] instance_name|job_id}

Additional detail for this command can be found in the man page by issuing gmkusage --man at the command line.

Example 1. Creating a usage record

$ gmkusage -u jsmith -p chem -m cluster -X Charge=2468 -P 2 -t 1234 -J PBS.1234.0
Successfully created 1 usage record with id 246

The fields which are displayed by default by this command can be customized by setting the usagerecord.show configuration parameter in gold.conf.

Use of the gmkusage command to record usage will not result in the debiting of a user's allocation. Use gcharge instead if you wish to charge for the usage.