Measurement of system operational statistics

A variety of statistics useful to installation managers can be obtained continuously at little cost in computing time. The designers of programming support for gathering such information must be cognizant, of those areas where unreasonable amounts of machine time can be consumed. For greater efficiency, they must also carefully consider the kinds of information that are actually needed, while providing sufficient flexibility to obtain additional data the need for which was not originally anticipated. Two general approaches were of major significance in achieving these objectives for the job accounting system. The first was the decision to provide data at optional levels of detail, thus reducing the time lost collecting unwanted information. The second was the use of a data base in which to store all monitored information. Post-processing of the data base can then be used to produce reports tailored to particular needs.