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System Administration Guide: IP Services

Recording Information About Traffic Flows

You use the IPQoS flowacct module to collect information about traffic flows. For example, you can collect source and destination addresses, number of packets in a flow, and similar data. The process of accumulating and recording information about flows is called flow accounting.

The results of flow accounting on traffic of a particular class are recorded in a table of flow records. Each flow record consists of a series of attributes. These attributes contain data about traffic flows of a particular class over an interval of time. For a list of the flowacct attributes, refer to Table 37–4.

Flow accounting is particularly useful for billing clients as is defined in their service-level agreements (SLAs). You can also use flow accounting to obtain flow statistics for critical applications. This section contains tasks for using flowacct with the Oracle Solaris extended accounting facility to obtain data on traffic flows.

The following information is contained in sources outside this chapter:

ProcedureHow to Create a File for Flow-Accounting Data

Before you add a flowacct action to the IPQoS configuration file, you must create a file for flow records from the flowacct module. You use the acctadm command for this purpose. acctadm can record either basic attributes or extended attributes in the file. All flowacct attributes are listed in Table 37–4. For detailed information about acctadm, refer to the acctadm(1M) man page.

  1. Assume the Primary Administrator role, or become superuser, on the IPQoS-enabled system.

    The Primary Administrator role includes the Primary Administrator profile. To create the role and assign the role to a user, see Chapter 2, Working With the Solaris Management Console (Tasks), in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

  2. Create a basic flow-accounting file.

    The following example shows how to create a basic flow-accounting file for the premium web server that is configured in Example 34–1.


    # /usr/sbin/acctadm -e basic -f /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info flow
    acctadm -e

    Invokes acctadm with the -e option. The -e option enables the arguments that follow.

    basic

    States that only data for the eight basic flowacct attributes is to be recorded in the file.

    /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info

    Specifies the fully qualified path name of the file to hold the flow records from flowacct.

    flow

    Instructs acctadm to enable flow accounting.

  3. View information about flow accounting on the IPQoS system by typing acctadm without arguments.

    acctadm generates the following output:

    Task accounting: inactive
       Task accounting file: none
     Tracked task resources: none
   Untracked task resources: extended
         Process accounting: inactive
    Process accounting file: none
  Tracked process resources: none
Untracked process resources: extended,host,mstate
            Flow accounting: active
       Flow accounting file: /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info
     Tracked flow resources: basic
   Untracked flow resources: dsfield,ctime,lseen,projid,uid

    All entries but the last four are for use with the Solaris Resource Manager feature. The next table explains the entries that are specific to IPQoS.

    Entry 

    Description 

    Flow accounting: active

    Indicates that flow accounting is turned on. 

    Flow accounting file: /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info

    Gives the name of the current flow-accounting file. 

    Tracked flow resources: basic

    Indicates that only the basic flow attributes are tracked. 

    Untracked flow resources: dsfield,ctime,lseen,projid,uid

    Lists the flowacct attributes that are not tracked in the file.

  4. (Optional) Add the extended attributes to the accounting file.


    # acctadm -e extended -f /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info flow

  5. (Optional) Return to recording only the basic attributes in the accounting file.


    # acctadm -d extended -e basic -f /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info

    The -d option disables extended accounting.

  6. View the contents of a flow-accounting file.

    Instructions for viewing the contents of a flow-accounting file are in Perl Interface to libexacct in System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones.

See Also