System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services

Overview

Before you can apply resource management mechanisms, you must first be able to characterize the resource consumption demands that various workloads place on a system. The extended accounting facility in the Solaris operating environment provides a flexible way to record resource consumption on a task or process basis. This facility is unlike online monitoring tools, which permit measurement of system usage in real time. Extended accounting enables you to examine historical usage and make assessments of capacity requirements for future workloads.

With extended accounting data available, you can develop or purchase software for resource chargeback, workload monitoring, or capacity planning.