I am using munin to track overall system resource usage so I know that there was a peak last night. The problem is that I miss a tool to find out what processes were running at the time so I have no way to analyze it further. For that purpose I have installed psacct package on my centos 6.3 machine so that next time a peak occurs I can find out the cause.
The package psacct looked good for that purpose but after installing it I am not sure how to print processes executed in a certain time range. Is there a way to do it? Or should I pick some other tool/package to get the past information about processes (launch/completion time and ideally their system usage).
Now that I think of it, I can also log output of top every minute or so. That would probably serve the purpose but maybe there is a better way.
Process accounting needs to be running prior to the process being started. It will not account already running processes when process accounting was enabled.
You'll need to restart the processes for it to account them.