Extended Accounting Subsystem Enhancements

Extended accounting is new when the Solaris 9 Operating System was originally distributed in May 2002. The Software Express pilot program introduced flow accounting enhancements and a Perl interface. These enhancements are included in the Solaris 10 3/05 release.

For Solaris 9 users, flow accounting enhancements are new in the Solaris 9 9/02 release. The Perl interface is new in the Solaris 9 4/03 release.

You can use extended accounting processes in conjunction with the flow accounting module for IPQoS. For information about IPQoS, see Part VII, “IP Quality of Service (IPQoS),” in the System Administration Guide: IP Services.

For information about the extended accounting feature, see Chapter 5, “Administering Extended Accounting (Tasks),” in the System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones.

A Perl interface to libexacct is available in the Software Express releases. This interface enables you to create Perl scripts that can read the accounting files which are produced by the exacct framework. You can also create Perl scripts that write exacct files. The new interface is functionally equivalent to the underlying C API.

You can use the Perl interface to record system resource consumption on a task or process basis. Or, you can record consumption on the basis of selectors provided by the IPQoS flowacct module.

For further information, see the following man pages:

• Exacct(3PERL)

• Exacct::Catalog(3PERL)

• Exacct::File(3PERL)

• Exacct::Object(3PERL)

• Exacct::Object::Group(3PERL)

• Exacct::Object::Item(3PERL)

• Kstat(3PERL)

• Project(3PERL)

• Task(3PERL)

For information on how to configure and use extended accounting with enhancements described in this section, see Chapter 4, “Extended Accounting (Overview),” in the System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones.