Accounting Properties
An accounting property is any one of the properties that make up an UsageRecord. Each accounting property has a name and a type. Every accounting property belongs to a PropertyRegistry.
The supported Accounting properties are determined by the configuration of the accounting parser and the accounting policies.
There are basically two types of accounting property:
- Quantities
- These are numerical properties that quantify the amount of consumption of a particular resource that is represented by the UsageRecord. For example CPU seconds or Mb of memory. Typically usage data from multiple UsageRecords can be combined by adding together Quantities.
- Classifications
- These are properties that provide information about how the resources were consumed. For example the start and end time of the period resource was used, the username a job was run under etc. In some cases a classification implies other additional classification properties, for example a username can be used to identify a person who has additional properties such as a school or department.
Database persistence
When accounting data is uploaded into the system, all of the supported properties are generated (and are available for use by accounting policy objects), however the properties will only be stored in the database where a corresponding database field exists. Therefore accounting reports can only use the persisted properties and derived properties created from them. By default AccountingProperty values are mapped to database fields of the same name. This mapping can be overridden by setting a java property of the form:
accounting.[table-name].[field-name]=[accounting-property-name]
You can control which accounting properties are persisted by adding or deleting table fields using the administration forms.
