NAME
     csa - overview of Comprehensive System Accounting (CSA)

DESCRIPTION
     CSA (Comprehensive System Accounting) is a set of C programs and
     shell scripts that, like other accounting packages, provide methods
     for collecting per-process resource usage data, monitoring disk usage,
     and charging fees to specific login accounts.

     CSA provides the following features which are not available with the
     other accounting packages:

     o   Per-job accounting

     o   Daemon accounting (tape, batch and workload management systems)

     o   Flexible accounting periods (daily and periodic accounting reports
         can be generated as often as desired and not restricted to once per
         day or once per month)

     o   Flexible system billing units (SBUs)

     o   Offline archiving of accounting data

     o   User exits for site specific customization of daily and periodic
         accounting

     o   Configurable parameters

     o   User job accounting (ja(1) command)

     CSA takes this per-process accounting information and combines it by 
     job identifier (jid) within system boot uptime periods.  CSA accounting
     for an interactive job consists of all accounting data for a given job
     identifier during a single system boot period.  CSA accounting for a
     batch job includes the accounting data associated with the batch system
     identifier, which may consist of one or more job identifiers and may 
     span multiple reboots.

     Daemon accounting records are written at the completion of daemon
     specific events.  These records are combined with per-process accounting
     records associated with the same interactive or batch job.

     By default, CSA only reports accounting data for terminated jobs.
     Interactive jobs, cron jobs and at jobs terminate when the last process
     in the job exits, which is normally the login shell.  A batch or 
     workload management job is recognized as terminated by CSA based 
     upon daemon accounting records and an end-of-job record for that
     job.  Jobs which are still active are recycled into the next
     accounting period.  This behavior can be changed through use of the
     csarun -A option.

     A system billing unit (SBU) is a unit of measure that reflects use of
     machine resources.  SBUs are defined in the CSA configuration file
     and are set to 0.0 by default.  The weighting factor associated
     with each field in the CSA accounting records can be altered
     to obtain an SBU value suitable for your site. 

     The CSA accounting records are not written into the Linux BSD
     pacct file but are written into a separate CSA pacct file.  The
     CSA commands can only be used with CSA generated accounting records.
     Similarly, the BSD accounting commands can only be used with BSD
     generated accounting records.

     There are four user exits available with the csarun daily accounting
     script.  There is one user exit available with the csaperiod periodic
     accounting script.  These user exits allow sites to tailor the daily
     and periodic run of accounting to their specific needs by creating
     user exit scripts to perform any additional processing and to allow
     archiving of accounting data.

     CSA provides two user accounting commands, csacom and ja.  The
     csacom command reads the CSA pacct file and writes selected accounting
     records to standard output.  The csacom command is very similar to the
     System V acctcom command.  The ja command provides job accounting
     information for the current job of the caller.  This information is
     obtained from a separate user job accounting file to which the kernel
     writes.

     The csaswitch command is used to dynamically configure on or off CSA
     record types, set memory and I/O threshold values to limit the number
     of accounting records written, switch the CSA pacct file, and
     provide status information.