Patent ID: 7620950

Claim:
A method for determining an amount of usage of applications in a logical partition in a computer system and a bill for such usage, said method comprising: executing a guest operating system in said logical partition; said guest operating system dispatching a plurality of applications in said logical partition; said guest operating system or other program executing in said logical partition determining information indicative of an amount of usage of each of said applications; determining a total usage of all of said applications in said logical partition based on said information indicative of said amount of usage of each of said applications determined by said guest operating system or said other program; determining, by a hardware usage monitor, logical partition usage information for hardware resources used by the logical partition; based on said information, reporting said amount of usage of each of said applications to a billing function; and comparing said total usage of all of said applications to an amount of usage of hardware resources by said logical partition to audit said amount of usage of said applications in said logical partition or a charge based on said amount of usage of said applications; said billing function determining a bill for each of said applications based on said amount of usage of each of said applications and said logical partition usage of hardware resources.