Daily Accounting Reports

The runacct shell script generates five basic reports upon each invocation. The following table describes these reports.

Table 10-2 Daily Accounting Reports

Report Type	Description
Daily Report	Shows terminal line utilization by tty number.
Daily Usage Report	Indicates usage of system resources by users (listed in order of user ID).
Daily Command Summary	Indicates usage of system resources by commands, listed in descending order of memory use. In other words, the command that used the most memory is listed first. This same information is reported for the month in the monthly command summary.
Monthly Command Summary	A cumulative summary that reflects the data accumulated since the last invocation of the monacct program.
Last Login Report	Shows the last time each user logged in (listed in chronological order).

Daily Report

This report gives information about each terminal line used. The following is a sample Daily Report.

Jan 16 02:30 2004  DAILY REPORT FOR venus Page 1


from Mon Jan 15 02:30:02 2004
to   Tue Oan 16 02:30:01 2004
1       runacct
1       acctcon

TOTAL DURATION IS 1440 MINUTES
LINE         MINUTES  PERCENT  # SESS  # ON  # OFF
console      868      60       1       1     2
TOTALS       868      --       1       1     2

The from and to lines specify the time period reflected in the report. This time period covers the time the last Daily Report was generated to the time the current Daily Report was generated. Then, the report presents a log of system reboots, shutdowns, power failure recoveries, and any other record written to the /var/adm/wtmpx file by the acctwtmp program. For more information, see the acct(1M) man page.

The second part of the report is a breakdown of terminal line utilization. The TOTAL DURATION tells how long the system was in multiuser mode (accessible through the terminal lines). The following table describes the data provided by the Daily Report.

Table 10-3 Daily Report Data

Column	Description
LINE	The terminal line or access port.
MINUTES	The number of minutes that the line was in use during the accounting period.
PERCENT	The TOTAL DURATION divided by the number of MINUTES.
# SESS	The number of times this line or port was accessed for a login session.
# ON	Same as SESS. (This column no longer has meaning. Previously, this column listed the number of times that a line or port was used to log in a user.)
# OFF T	The number of times a user logs out and any interrupts that occur on that line. Generally, interrupts occur on a port when ttymon is first invoked after the system is brought to multiuser mode. If the # OFF exceeds the # SESS by a large factor, the multiplexer, modem, or cable is probably going bad. Or, a bad connection exists somewhere. The most common cause is an unconnected cable dangling from the multiplexer.

During real time, you should monitor the /var/adm/wtmpx file because it is the file from which the connect accounting is derived. If the wtmpx file grows rapidly, execute the following command to see which tty line is the noisiest.

# /usr/lib/acct/acctcon -l file < /var/adm/wtmpx

If interruption is occurring frequently, general system performance will be affected. Additionally, the wtmp file might become corrupted. To correct this problem, see How to Fix a Corrupted wtmpx File.

Daily Usage Report

The Daily Usage Report breaks down system resource utilization by user. A sample of this report follows.

Jan 16 02:30 2004  DAILY USAGE REPORT FOR skisun Page 1


     LOGIN  CPU  (MINS)  KCORE-   MINS    CONNECT  (MINS) DISK   # OF   # OF  # DISK  FEE
UID  NAME   PRIME NPRIME PRIME    NPRIME  PRIME    NPRIME BLOCKS PROCS  SESS  SAMPLES
0    TOTAL  72    148    11006173 51168   26230634 57792  539    330    0     2150    1
0    root   32    76     11006164 33664   26230616 22784  0      0      0     127     0
4    adm    0     0      22       51      0        0      0      420    0     0       0
101  rimmer 39    72     894385   1766020 539      330    0      1603   1     0       0

The following table describes the data provided by the Daily Usage Report.

Table 10-4 Daily Usage Report Data

Column	Description
UID	User ID number.
LOGIN NAME	Login (or user) name of the user. Identifies a user who has multiple login names.
CPU (MINS)	Amount of time, in minutes, that the user's process used the central processing unit. Divided into PRIME and NPRIME (nonprime) utilization. The accounting system's version of this data is located in the /etc/acct/holidays file.
KCORE-MINS	A cumulative measure of the amount of memory in Kbyte segments per minute that a process uses while running. Divided into PRIME and NPRIME utilization.
CONNECT (MINS)	Amount of time, in minutes, that the a user was logged in to the system, or “real time.” Divided into PRIME and NPRIME utilization. If these numbers are high while the # OF PROCS is low, you can conclude that the user logs in first thing in the morning and hardly touches the terminal the rest of the day.
DISK BLOCKS	Output from the acctdusg program, which runs the disk accounting programs and merges the accounting records (daytacct). For accounting purposes, a block is 512 bytes.
# OF PROCS	Number of processes invoked by the user. If large numbers appear, a user might have a shell procedure that has run out of control.
# OF SESS	Number of times that a user logged in to the system.
# DISK SAMPLES	Number of times that disk accounting was run to obtain the average number of DISK BLOCKS.
FEE	Often unused field that represents the total accumulation of units charged against the user by the chargefee script.

Daily Command Summary

The Daily Command Summary report shows the system resource utilization by command. With this report, you can identify the most heavily used commands. Based on how those commands use system resources, you can then gain insight on how best to tune the system.

These reports are sorted by TOTAL KCOREMIN, which is an arbitrary gauge but often useful for calculating drain on a system.

A sample Daily Command Summary follows.

                                TOTAL COMMAND SUMMARY
COMMAND   NUMBER      TOTAL   TOTAL     TOTAL   MEAN    MEAN     HOG   CHARS   BLOCKS
NAME        CMDS    KCOREMIN CPU-MIN REAL-MIN  SIZE-K  CPU-MIN  FACTOR TRNSFD  READ

TOTALS      2150  1334999.75  219.59 724258.50 6079.48   0.10   0.00   397338982 419448

netscape      43  2456898.50   92.03  54503.12 26695.51  2.14   0.00   947774912 225568
adeptedi       7    88328.22    4.03    404.12 21914.95  0.58   0.01    93155160   8774
dtmail         1    54919.17    5.33  17716.57 10308.94  5.33   0.00   213843968  40192
acroread       8    31218.02    2.67  17744.57 11682.66  0.33   0.00   331454464  11260
dtwm           1    16252.93    2.53  17716.57 6416.05   2.53   0.00   158662656  12848
dtterm         5     4762.71    1.30  76300.29 3658.93   0.26   0.00    33828352  11604
dtaction      23     1389.72    0.33      0.60 4196.43   0.01   0.55    18653184    539
dtsessio       1     1174.87    0.24  17716.57 4932.97   0.24   0.00    23535616   5421
dtcm           1      866.30    0.18  17716.57 4826.21   0.18   0.00     3012096   6490

The following table describes the data provided by the Daily Command Summary.

Table 10-5 Daily Command Summary Data

Column	Description
COMMAND NAME	Name of the command. All shell procedures are lumped together under the name sh because only object modules are reported by the process accounting system. You should monitor the frequency of programs called a.out or core, or any other unexpected name. You can use the acctcom program to determine who executed an oddly named command and if superuser privileges were used.
NUMBER CMDS	Total number of times this command was run.
TOTAL KCOREMIN	Total cumulative measurement of the Kbyte segments of memory used by a process per minute of run time.
TOTAL CPU-MIN	Total processing time this program accumulated.
TOTAL REAL-MIN	Total real-time (wall-clock) minutes this program accumulated.
MEAN SIZE-K	Mean (average) of the TOTAL KCOREMIN over the number of invocations reflected by the NUMBER CMDS.
MEAN CPU-MIN	Mean (average) derived from the NUMBER CMDS and the TOTAL CPU-MIN.
HOG FACTOR	Total CPU time divided by elapsed time. Shows the ratio of system availability to system utilization, providing a relative measure of total available CPU time consumed by the process during its execution.
CHARS TRNSFD	Total number of characters transferred by the read and write system calls. Might be negative due to overflow.
BLOCKS READ	Total number of the physical block reads and writes that a process performed.

Monthly Command Summary

The format of the Daily Command Summary and the Monthly Command Summary reports are virtually the same. However, the daily summary reports only on the current accounting period while the monthly summary reports on the start of the fiscal period to the current date. In other words, the monthly report is a cumulative summary that reflects the data accumulated since the last invocation of the monacct program.

A sample Monthly Command Summary follows.

Jan 16 02:30 2004  MONTHLY TOTAL COMMAND SUMMARY Page 1


                                     TOTAL COMMAND SUMMARY
COMMAND   NUMBER      TOTAL   TOTAL     TOTAL   MEAN     MEAN    HOG      CHARS    BLOCKS
NAME        CMDS    KCOREMIN CPU-MIN  REAL-MIN  SIZE-K   CPU-MIN FACTOR  TRNSFD    READ

TOTALS     42718  4398793.50  361.92  956039.00 12154.09 0.01    0.00  16100942848 825171

netscape     789  3110437.25  121.03   79101.12 25699.58 0.15    0.00   3930527232 302486
adeptedi      84  1214419.00   50.20    4174.65 24193.62 0.60    0.01    890216640 107237
acroread     145   165297.78    7.01   18180.74 23566.84 0.05    0.00   1900504064  26053
dtmail         2    64208.90    6.35   20557.14 10112.43 3.17    0.00    250445824  43280
dtaction     800    47602.28   11.26      15.37  4226.93 0.01    0.73    640057536   8095
soffice.      13    35506.79    0.97       9.23 36510.84 0.07    0.11    134754320   5712
dtwm           2    20350.98    3.17   20557.14  6419.87 1.59    0.00    190636032  14049

For a description of the data provided by the Monthly Command Summary, see Daily Command Summary.

Last Login Report

This report gives the date when a particular login was last used. You can use this information to find unused logins and login directories that can be archived and deleted. A Last Login Report follows.

Jan 16 02:30 2004  LAST LOGIN Page 1


01-06-12  kryten         01-09-08  protoA      01-10-14  ripley
01-07-14  lister         01-09-08  protoB      01-10-15  scutter1
01-08-16  pmorph         01-10-12  rimmer      01-10-16  scutter2

Examining the pacct File With acctcom

At any time, you can examine the contents of the /var/adm/pacctn files, or any file with records in the acct.h format, by using the acctcom program. If you do not specify any files and do not provide any standard input when you run this command, the acctcom command reads the pacct file. Each record read by the acctcom command represents information about a terminated process. Active processes can be examined by running the ps command.

The default output of the acctcom command provides the following information:

# acctcom
COMMAND                           START    END          REAL     CPU    MEAN
NAME       USER     TTYNAME       TIME     TIME       (SECS)  (SECS) SIZE(K)
#accton    root      ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.03    0.01  304.00
turnacct   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.42    0.01  320.00
mv         adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.07    0.01  504.00
utmp_upd   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.03    0.01  712.00
utmp_upd   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.01    0.01  824.00
utmp_upd   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.01    0.01  912.00
utmp_upd   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.01    0.01  920.00
utmp_upd   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.01    0.01 1136.00
utmp_upd   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.01    0.01  576.00
closewtm   adm       ?            02:30:01 02:30:01     0.10    0.01  664.00

Field	Explanation
COMMAND NAME	Command name (pound (#) sign if the command was executed with superuser privileges)
USER	User name
TTYNAME	tty name (listed as ? if unknown)
START TIME	Command execution starting time
END TIME	Command execution ending time
REAL (SECS)	Real time (in seconds)
CPU (SECS)	CPU time (in seconds)
MEAN SIZE (K)	Mean size (in Kbytes)

You can obtain the following information by using acctcom command options.

• State of the fork/exec flag (1 for fork without exec)

• System exit status

• Hog factor

• Total kcore minutes

• CPU factor

• Characters transferred

• Blocks read

The following table describes the acctcom command options.

Table 10-6 Options for the acctcom Command

Option	Description
-a	Shows average statistics about the processes selected. The statistics are printed after the output is recorded.
-b	Reads the files backward, showing latest commands first. This option has no effect if reading standard input.
-f	Prints the fork/exec flag and system exit status columns. The output is an octal number.
-h	Instead of mean memory size, shows the hog factor, which is the fraction of total available CPU time consumed by the process during its execution. Hog factor = total-CPU-time/elapsed-time.
-i	Prints columns that contains the I/O counts in the output.
-k	Shows total kcore minutes instead of memory size.
-m	Shows mean core size. This size is the default.
-q	Prints average statistics, not output records.
-r	Shows CPU factor: user-time/(system-time + user-time).
-t	Shows separate system and user CPU times.
-v	Excludes column headings from the output.
-C sec	Shows only processes with total CPU time (system plus user) that exceeds sec seconds.
-e time	Shows processes existing at or before time, given in the format hr[:min[:sec]]
-E time	Shows processes starting at or before time, given in the format hr[:min[:sec]]. Using the same time for both -S and -E, shows processes that existed at the time.
-g group	Shows only processes that belong to group.
-H factor	Shows only processes that exceed factor, where factor is the “hog factor” (see the -h option).
-I chars	Shows only processes that transferred more characters than the cutoff number specified by chars.
-l line	Show only processes that belong to the terminal /dev/line.
-n pattern	Shows only commands that match pattern (a regular expression except that “+” means one or more occurrences).
-o ofile	Instead of printing the records, copies them in acct.h format to ofile.
-O sec	Shows only processes with CPU system time that exceeds sec seconds.
-s time	Show processes existing at or after time, given in the format hr[:min[:sec]].
-S time	Show processes starting at or after time, given in the format hr[:min[:sec]].
-u user	Shows only processes that belong to user.