Installation guide

12
Administering the System Accounting
Services
This chapter describes how to set up and use the system accounting
services. The accounting services are shell scripts and commands you use
to manipulate an accounting database to obtain a diagnostic history of
system resource use and user activity and to create report files.
By using the accounting services, you can obtain accounting information for
the following:
• Amount of connect time
• Amount of CPU time
• Number of processes spawned
• Number of connect sessions
• Amount of memory usage
• Number of I/O operations and number of characters transferred
• Disk space usage (in blocks)
• Amount of modem usage and telephone connect time
• Printer usage, including the number of printing operations and amount
of printed matter, according to user name or printer name
You can set up accounting so that information is collected automatically on
a periodic basis. You can also manually invoke accounting shell scripts and
commands to obtain accounting information when you need it.
12.1 Accounting Overview
If accounting is enabled, the kernel and other system processes write
records to the accounting database files, which are the source of all the
accounting information.
The accounting database files are located in the /var/adm directory and
include the following files:
Administering the System Accounting Services 12–1