Are You Using the Right 4-Hour Rolling Average?

Abstract

One of the biggest part of mainframe budgeting is the Monthly License Charging (MLC)for software. The MLC for software covers the license and support cost for the majority of IBM software’s like z/OS, CICS, DB2, IMS. Earlier this chargeback was done relative to the full capacity of the machine. In 2000 IBM introduced the Sub-capacity pricing option and most organizations quickly adopted to this usage metric of billing. The usage is calculated based on the Rolling 4-Hour Average (R4HA). It is important to keep a track of 4-Hour Average to gain an insight on what is driving your monthly software bills. The Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool is an IBM tool which generates a monthly licensing cost report for sub capacity eligible products by analyzing a month worth of data for IBM Z environment. Tivoli Decision Support for Z/OS leverages the performance data to generate insightful reports for different components of System Z. One of the reports which can be produced is the monthly 4Hour Rolling Average report to understand what drives the monthly licensing costs. The focus of this paper would be to establish are porting technique that will align with the SCRT report using Tivoli Decision Support for Z/OS.