Interval accounting

Interval accounting provides a way to collect accounting data at specified intervals. You can configure it to produce intermediate process records for active processes.

Records from interval accounting can be added to the completed process records to produce a more accurate bill reflecting the total use of the system by a user in a given time period. Interval accounting can also be configured to periodically capture accounting data for system resources like processors, memory, disks, network interfaces, and file systems. This information can be used to generate a bill that reflects the total use of a partition.

Usage information about system resources has other applications beyond chargeback. It can be used to perform capacity planning because it shows the use of physical resources like processors, memory, disks, and network interfaces. Interval accounting provides a time-based view of these resources, so that load can be determined, enabling capacity-based decisions to be made based on the data. For example, it is possible to determine the idle processor capacity in a given interval, which can be used to determine whether more processors are needed.

Interval accounting provides a historical view of resource use, which can be used for performance analysis. For example, the file system records can be examined to determine which file systems were busy when access to the system was slow. The data identifies multiple busy file systems served by the same disk adapter. This information can be used to balance file systems over disk adapters. You do not always know which file sets are being accessed at a given time, so having the ability to replay a log with this information is an asset.