How to find process status at a older time

Question

The command 'ps' gives current status of the processes. Is there any way to find the status of a particular process in the past: say I would like to know the status of a particular process 48 hours before from now?

I have a unit crashing and wanted to know the status of different processes during the exact time when the crash occurred.

Following command gives the uptime of the process:

ls -al /proc | grep <Process id> 

But I need to know the status of the process at a older time.

Answer 1

You have to run some program that does monitoring and logging over time. For a start, you may study how atop (https://linux.die.net/man/1/atop) works.

If you don't run any real-time monitoring tool, most likely you won't be able to see what happened in the past. But if you start using one now - you will be able to see in the future.