The utility metering service of the Universal Management Infrastructure

One of the main characteristics of on demand computing in general and of utility computing services in particular is the “pay-as-you-go” model. To implement this model, one needs a flexible way to meter the services and resources being used. The UMI (Universal Management Infrastructure) architecture, designed to provide common functions that are needed by most, if not all, of the utilities in a utility computing system, therefore includes a metering function. The architecture of the metering system is hierarchical and highly flexible. This paper reviews the metering service architecture and describes how UMI’s metering service function is used in the context of utility computing services, for collecting and storing metered data, computing service metrics (which are useful to the data-consuming applications), and feeding the metrics to various consumer modules (e.g., for accounting and billing).