Chapter 26 Managing Resources With System Accounting

The Solaris accounting software has been enhanced in the Solaris 8 6/00 release. The following information supplements information on using system accounting for managing resources that is in “Managing System Accounting (Tasks)” in the System Administration Guide, Volume 2.

For the most current man pages, use the man command. The Solaris 8 Update release man pages include new feature information that is not in the Solaris 8 Reference Manual Collection.

Extended Accounting Features

Extended accounting introduces a new variable-length, general-purpose accounting file format that represents general groups of accounting data. Also included is the ability to configure resource utilization that is recorded by the kernel in the various accounting files. Extended accounting features include:

• Tasks – New process collectives for tracking resource usage.

• Projects – New administrative databases for charging resource usage. You can charge resource usage by a task to a project.

• acctadm – A new tool for configuring various attributes of the extended accounting facility. For example, you can configure the resources that are tracked by the accounting system on a system-wide basis.

The new default accounting configuration requires no administration and causes no complications. If you do use the extended accounting features, however, do not remove the /etc/project file, which contains important information about the extended accounting configuration.

Use the following table to find more information about the extended accounting features in this release.