How to know the no. of users and what they did at perticular time

[sinhass]

Can anybody pls let me know how I will check the no.of users logged in a perticular time and what they did ? I know the last command helps. But is there other way to check why performance of a perticular server degrades ?
Thanks
-sinhass

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Probably the most rogorous method is to enable system accounting -- if you can tolerate the system overhead. Man 1m acct to get started.

Typically a better approach is to use Glance or the other MeasureWare Tools. You can install a 60-day trial version of Glance using any Applications CD Set.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

Unless you enabled tools like Auditing/IDS9000/Accounting it would be difficult to find what they did. You can get partial information if you have measureware and if you setup Application groups in side it. Some people run cronjob to capture the ps output and I found it helpful sometimes in situations like this. However, it's only a gamble as the ps output is nothing but a snapshot at that time.

-Sri

[Patrick Wallek]

The best tools to use for this are Glance, Measureware and PerfView.

With normal tools there is really no way to tell exactly what was going on at any time in the past.

If you don't have Glance, Measureware and Perfview installed you can install a 90-day (I think) demo from your Applications CDs.

[sinhass]

Thanks U all. So I think that I don't have other way to know it. I think in hpux 9.04 it was available with some combination of acctcms & other accounting commands. But that I forgot. Again thank you all for your time.

-sinhass

[Bill Hassell]

Performance problems are not usually related to the number of users...you could have 500 user logins all sitting at a shell prompt and there would be no performance impact at all. The first step in analyzing performance problems is to look at disk and CPU usage. top will give you CPU usage (only) while sar -d 1 10 will give some disk stats. But classic Unix tools are very difficult to use in diagnosing performance problems. It isn't important to know what the users are doing until you identify the programs that are causing the biggest load on the system. As mentioned, Glance will save hundreds of hours of looking over data and trying to make sense of the details.

[Alianto]

the very simple approach is 'w'. yes, just type 'w' at shell prompt. w will return us the information about currently logged-in users.