Name

ppuservice

Description

ppuservice (HP Pay Per Use Service) is a Windows service that provides system configuration and core usage information to your utility meter for billing purposes. The service meters core utilization and server configuration information, and sends that information to the utility meter as an XML file. Messages and errors are logged to the Windows Event Log.

Reports are written to the cache directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Hewlett-Packard\ppu\cache) before being forwarded to the utility meter at 30-minute intervals. If the connection to the utility meter fails, the report data is cached until the connection is restored. Reports are best viewed using a web browser that can interpret XML. If your browser does not support XML, you can open these files with a text-based editor such as Wordpad on Windows.

ppuservice is first started during installation or when you specify your utility meter using the ppuconfig command. Thereafter it restarts automatically any time the partition is rebooted. If for some reason the service is killed manually, it can also be launched again by running the ppuconfig -m meter command.

Note that ppuservice requires the nParProvider service to be running. If the nParProvider service stops while ppuservice is running, eventually ppuservice will detect this, and will issue an event log error and will display a message similar to “ERROR: HP Pay per use is not supported on this class system, or the local HP WMINParProvider is not running. Please double check your configuration”. This causes the PPU service to stop as well. If this happens, the administrator can start both services using the services.msc applet.

See Also

“PPU Software”
“ppuconfig Command”