Overview

Account structure

The account structure for a CSA solution typically includes the organization, person, and subscription. For example, CSA could have an account structure like the following:

Subscription is the lowest account level. It provides an account to map in provider specific resource consumption, such as Matrix Operating Environment (MOE) or vCenter resources.

You can configure the account as a default to meet your needs. For more information, see Working with account structures.

Organizations

CSA Organizations contain persons which are essentially the end users requesting services. Importing persons is optional and creates a customer record for accounts at the person level when activated.

Organizational data in CSA can be imported to establish a customer record per organization. Having a customer record simplifies scoping reports and makes it easier to define budgets and set alerts. For more information, see Managing customers.

You must configure the organization importer to construct an account identifier for the organization that will match the account codes created when loading subscription data. Both organization import and data loading should align with the account structure defined for the solution.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions represent the consumption of services and service infrastructure by the user, and are the source of data for all charges and historical reporting. In CSA, a subscription can be flexed , meaning that the underlying service or service options can change. To accurately track subscription state and load the proper data, subscription data must be polled at regular intervals or the history of service requests that affect subscription state can be mined for data. The sample solution does the latter and does not require polling. This means that collection can be performed for previous dates and will remain accurate.