Saturday, February 26, 2005

Extended Accounting in Solaris 8-10

This is a very under-used facility introduced in Solaris 8. Solaris 10
extends it so that you can get TCP flow accounting as well as extended
process accounting info. It also adds a perl interface.

Unlike traditional unix accounting - which is low overhead but stores
very poor quality information - extended accounting can save data at
fixed time intervals (as well as at process termination). It can be
configured to store detailed information, and in Solaris 10 since
microstate accounting is enabled for all processes by default you can
get the microstate details for everything with no extra overhead. I'll
be digging into the details of how to configure and process this data
soon.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Adrian,

    I would love to hear more from you on extended process accounting. I recently collapsed 4 servers into one V490 with four containers. Extended accounting seems to be the answer for reporting and understanding application behavior in this new Solaris 10 / containerized / virtualized world.

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  2. Seems that when you reboot you need to restart the extended accounting. Is there a svc that can be enabled to do this automatically, or am I going to have to write a rc3.d script that runs acctadm -u ?

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