IPQoS Administration Guide

Recording Information About Flows

You use the IPQoS flowacct module to collect information about traffic flows, such as the source and destination addresses, amount 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 6–4.

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 Solaris extended accounting facility to obtain data on traffic flows.

The following information is contained in sources outside this chapter:

For instructions on creating an action statement for flowacct in the IPQoS configuration file, refer to How to Configure Flow Control in the IPQoS Configuration File.
To learn how flowacct works, refer to Classifier Module.
For technical information, refer to the flowacct(7ipp) man page.

How 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 6–4. For detailed information about acctadm, refer to acctadm(1m).

Create a basic flow-accounting file.

The following example shows how to create a basic flow-account file for the premium web server that is configured in Example 3–1.

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

Statement	Definition
`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 are 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`	Tells `acctadm` to enable flow accounting.

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 but the last four entries are for use with the Solaris 9 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

(Optional) Add the extended attributes to the accounting file as follows:
# acctadm -e extended -f /var/ipqos/goldweb/account.info flow

(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.

Where to Go Next

Task	For Instructions
Define `flowacct` parameters in the IPQoS configuration file	How to Enable Accounting for a Class in the IPQoS Configuration File
Print out the data in the file that was created with `acctadm`	How to Get Instructions for Viewing a Flow-Accounting File

How to Get Instructions for Viewing a Flow-Accounting File

You must create a script to display the contents of the flow-accounting file that was created by acctadm. You can use as the basis for your script a demonstration script for resource management tasks and processing accounting. The following task shows how to get information about the demonstration script.

Before you can use the next procedure, you must have created a file to hold flow records, as described in How to Create a File for Flow-Accounting Data. You also must have added a flowacct action and parameters to the IPQoS configuration file so that traffic classes are tracked by flowacct.

The next task introduces the libexacct programmatic interface and exdump utility to provide output for an acctadm file for viewing processes and tasks. For technical information, refer to the libexacct(3LIB) man page.

Become superuser on the IPQoS system and access the directory /usr/demo/libexacct.

This directory contains a Makefile and the exdump.c script.

Perform the instructions to build exdump as is explained in the README.

View the data in the flow-accounting file, as is explained in the README.