OSI/MHS Orientation Guide

Building Your Message Handling System
OSI/MHS Orientation Guide—424829-001
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Writing an Accounting and Billing Application
Writing an Accounting and Billing Application
A common requirement of backbone messaging networks is the need to bill clients for
the services they use. Even in a private network that does not use interdepartmental
billing, it can be very useful to gather accounting information to gain a sense of how
much, by whom, and in what ways the network is being used.
What You Need to Do
OSI/MHS supports the collection of accounting information through the Event
Management Service (EMS), a component of the Compaq management architecture,
which is called Distributed Systems Management (DSM). Figure 1-13 shows how you
can specify, and later retrieve and process, the accounting information of most interest to
you. The arrows show the direction in which information flows.
When you define your OSI/MHS environment, you specify the types of events you want
reported for billing purposes: for instance, submission of a message by a user, delivery
of a message to a user, or relay of a message on behalf of a user. Submission, delivery,
and relay of probes and reports, deferred delivery storage, and deletion of a message
from the message store are some other examples of possible accounting events. (In fact,
because the event-reporting interface is published, your applications can report
additional accounting events, such as a client’s use of a service that your application
provides.)
Figure 1-13. Reporting and Retrieval of Accounting Information
012CDT .CDD
Event Management Service (EMS)
You specify the
accounting data
(events) you want.
SCF
OSI/MHS
OSI/MHS reports
the events.
EMS
Collector
This system-
wide
or dedicated
process...
... logs
the
events.
EMS
Log
Billing
Application
Your application
retrieves the event
messages that matched
the filter.
This process applies
a filter you specify.
EMS
Distributor
Filter
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