Monitoring User Activity with psacct or acct

[ Thanks to Andrew Weber for this link. ]

"Monitoring with psacct
An excellent program for monitoring users and applications is psacct. This program will work in the background of your system recording what all users are doing on your system as well as the resources that are being consumed. I originally started using this program when a client asked for a way to monitor his developers and what they were doing on the servers that they were working on. psacct provided an excellent solution which told not only how long the developers were on the box but what commands they were using and how much of the resources they were using. Another great application for this program is to use it to evaluate the resources that applications are consumed on your server. So for example you could see the total resources consumed by apache, mysql, etc. Whether you are a CentOS Administrator or an Ubuntu Server Administrator or a home user wanting to track activity on your machine, this is a good program to explore.

"Install Process Accounting

yum install psacct

"on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install acct
Start Process Accounting

/etc/init.d/psacct start
Starting process accounting:
[ OK ]

"on Ubuntu

sudo service acct start"

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