How To Monitor User Activity In Linux

As a Linux administrator, you need to keep track of all users' activities. It will be helpful when something went wrong in the server. You can analyze and investigate the users' activities, and try to find the root cause of the problem. There are many ways to monitor users. In this guide, we are going to talk about GNU accounting utilities that can be used to monitor the user activity in Linux. The accounting utilities provides the useful information about system usage, such as connections, programs executed, and utilization of system resources. These accounting utilities can be installed using psacct or acct package. psacct or acct are same. In RPM based based, it is available as psacct, and in DEB based systems it is available as acct.

Generally, the user's command line history details will be stored in .bash_history file in their $HOME directory. Some users might try to edit, modify or delete the history. However, the accounting utilities will still be able to retrieve the users activities even though they cleared their command line history completely. Because, all process accounting files are owned by root user, and the normal users can't edit them.

Install psacct or acct

On RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux, run the following command as root user to install psacct:

$ sudo yum install psacct

Enable and start the psacct service using commands:

$ sudo systemctl enable psacct

$ sudo systemctl start psacct

On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, install it like below.

$ sudo apt-get install acct

The above command will install acct and start its service automatically.

You can verify whether it is started or not using command:

$ sudo systemctl status acct

Monitor User Activity In Linux

The psacct (Process accounting) package contains following useful utilities to monitor the user and process activities.

• ac - Displays statistics about how long users have been logged on.
• lastcomm - Displays information about previously executed commands.
• accton - Turns process accounting on or off.
• dump-acct - Transforms the output file from the accton format to a human-readable format.
• dump-utmp - Prints utmp files in human-readable format.
• sa - Summarizes information about previously executed commands.

Let us see one bye one with examples.

ac

The ac utility will display the report of connect time in hours. It can tell you how long a user or group of users were connected to the system.

$ ac

This command displays the total connect time of all users in hours.

total       30.62

You can sort this result by day-wise by using -d flag as shown below.

$ ac -d

Sample output:

Nov 24 total 0.81
Apr 12 total 0.01
Jun 20 total 9.27
Jun 30 total 0.23
Mar 11 total 5.34
Mar 16 total 0.70
Mar 21 total 9.55
Mar 23 total 1.77
Today total 3.03

Also, you can display how long each user was connected with the system with -p flag.

$ ac -p

Sample output:

sk 0.03
root 30.73
total 30.76

And also, you can display the individual user's total login time as well.

$ ac sk

Sample output:

total 0.03

To display individual user's login time by day-wise, run:

$ ac -d root

Sample output:

Nov 24 total 0.81
Apr 12 total 0.01
Jun 20 total 9.27
Jun 30 total 0.23
Mar 11 total 5.34
Mar 16 total 0.70
Mar 21 total 9.55
Mar 23 total 1.77
Today total 3.41

For more details, refer the man pages.

$ man ac

lastcomm

The lastcomm utility displays the list of previously executed commands. The most recent executed commands will be listed first.

$ lastcomm

Sample output:

sshd SF sshd __ 0.01 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
unix_chkpwd S root __ 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
unix_chkpwd S root __ 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
systemd-cgroups S root __ 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
systemd-cgroups S root __ 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
sshd S root __ 0.06 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
sshd SF sk __ 0.06 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
bash sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
clear sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
vi sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
cat sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
bash F sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
consoletype sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
grep sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
bash F sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09

The above command display all user's commands. You can display the previously executed commands by a particular user using command:

$ lastcomm sk

Sample output:

sshd SF sk __ 0.06 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
bash sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
clear sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
vi sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
cat sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
bash F sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
consoletype sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
grep sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09

Also, you can view how many times a particular command has been executed.

$ lastcomm vi

Sample output:

vi sk pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:09
vi root pts/1 0.00 secs Fri Mar 24 15:03

As you see in the above output, vi command has been executed twice by root and sk users.

For more details, refer the man pages.

$ man lastcomm

accton

This utility will allow you to turn on or turn off accounting.

To turn on process accounting, run:

$ accton on

To turn it off, run:

$ accton off

For more details, refer the man pages.

$ man accton

dump-acct and dump-utmp

The dump-acct utility displays the output file from the accton format to a human-readable format.

$ dump-acct /var/account/pacct

dump-utmp displays utmp files in human-readable format.

$ dump-utmp /var/run/utmp

For more details, refer the man pages.

$ man dump-acct

$ man dump-utmp

sa

The sa utility will summarize the information about previously executed commands.

$ sa

Sample output:

 318 951.07re 0.01cp 0avio 15299k
 4 33.04re 0.01cp 0avio 26352k sshd
 7 2.05re 0.00cp 0avio 25184k sshd*
 2 0.01re 0.00cp 0avio 89856k dnf
 35 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 29767k man*
 29 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 7377k bash*
 12 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 6259k unix_chkpwd
 12 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 2674k systemd-cgroups
 10 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 2260k grep
 9 166.31re 0.00cp 0avio 25375k ***other*
 9 110.33re 0.00cp 0avio 0k kworker/0:2*
 9 110.33re 0.00cp 0avio 0k kworker/0:0*
 9 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 3830k id
 8 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 1080k ac
 8 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 26976k logger
 8 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 26976k basename
 6 93.90re 0.00cp 0avio 29712k man
 6 0.00re 0.00cp 0avio 1629k clear
 5 119.94re 0.00cp 0avio 0k kworker/0:2H*
 5 93.90re 0.00cp 0avio 27568k less

To print the number of processes and number of CPU minutes on a per-user basis, just run:

$ sa -m

Sample output:

337 961.10re 0.01cp 0avio 15593k
root 286 857.82re 0.01cp 0avio 16672k
sk 45 3.88re 0.00cp 0avio 7992k
sshd 5 0.34re 0.00cp 0avio 20966k
postfix 1 99.06re 0.00cp 0avio 22272k

For more details, refer the man pages.

$ man sa

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Suggested Read:

• How To Limit User’s Access To The Linux System

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And, that's all. Every Linux administrator should aware of GNU accounting utilities to keep an eye on all users. These utilities will be helpful in troubleshooting time.

Resource:

• The GNU Accounting Utilities website