About Accounting - Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Configuration Manual

Chapter 12 Configuring AAA
AAA Overview
If you need the control that authorization provides, you can configure a broad authentication rule, and
then have a detailed authorization configuration. For example, you authenticate inside users to access
any server on the outside network and then limit the outside servers that a particular user can access using
authorization.
The FWSM caches the first 16 authorization requests per user, so if the user accesses the same services
during the current authentication session, the FWSM does not resend the request to the authorization
server.

About Accounting

Accounting lets you keep track of traffic that passes through the FWSM. If you enable authentication for
that traffic, you can account for traffic per user. If you do not authenticate the traffic, you can account
for traffic per IP address. Accounting information includes when sessions start and stop, the AAA client
messages and username, the number of bytes that pass through the FWSM for the session, the service
used, and the duration of each session.
Catalyst 6500 Series Switch and Cisco 7600 Series Router Firewall Services Module Configuration Guide
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