An accelerograph can be referred to as a strong-motion instrument or seismograph, or simply an earthquake accelerometer.
There is an entire science of strong ground motion, that is dedicated to studying the shaking in the vicinity of earthquakes (roughly within about 100 km of the fault rupture).
Often a response spectrum is computed to show how the earthquake would affect structures of different natural frequencies or periods.
For analogue and older digital instruments this makes maintenance much more difficult without a direct Internet connection (or some other means of communication).
Many trips have been made to accelerometers after a large earthquake, only to find that the memory was filled with extraneous noise, or the instrument was malfunctioning.