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Monitor Linux Performance With The Tools At Hand

Posted by timothy on from the i-t-b-w-t-c-l dept.

Jan Stafford writes "Need to monitor Linux performance without purchasing a pricey diagnostic package? Try these simple, built-in command line tools. This article was written by site expert and author (Rapid Application Development with Mozilla) Nigel McFarlane."

1 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. innacurate by Danny+Rathjens · · Score: 4, Insightful
    No offense, but this story is a joke. Did he even read the man pages for those utilities? The 'stat' in those tools names stand for 'statistics' not 'status'. And don't even get me started on stupid statements like "linux never swaps" and "If paging activity happens all the time, buy more RAM"

    These utilities are explained better in the man pages themselves or the various system administration guides and howtos at the linux documentaion project.

    Oh yeah, and he is missing one of the best tools for this type of thing: namely 'sar', the system activity reporter, which is enabled by default on all redhat distros. (I have an xpostit note dedicated to all the flags to sar for various things)

    As for the graphing/monitoring questions people are asking in other posts; look for tools like nagios and mrtg and sysmon and mon or just search freshmeat.net. It's quite a common task which has been done many ways. My personal monitoring/graphs are perl scripts I wrote to fetch stats via ssh which I plug into mrtg.