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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."

6 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Historic.. by noselasd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Most utilities mentioned are really great, but mostly realtime stats
    sometimes it's nice to see historic view on the machine as well.
    sysstat does just that.
    Now if only I can remember the thing that also use that statistics do
    draw graphs (with gnuplot iirc.) Anyone ?

    1. Re:Historic.. by Monster+Zero · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Ganglia Distributed Monitoring System is a nice tool for monitoring lots of systems, I use it to keep an eye on 66 servers. My current template has plots for Current Cluster CPU/MEM/Beowulf Queue, Cabinet Temperature, Free Disk Space for both RAID units, then shows the utilization of each of the 64 nodes. Its fairly customizable and works great. Shows hour/day/week/month/year plots selected by a drop down menu.

      It uses RRDTool to create the plots - very nice.

    2. Re:Historic.. by sydb · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Is there anything Free around to give per-process historical information a la BMC Patrol ("Draw me a graph of memory utilisation over the last 4 hours for PID 3325, and show me how much of it was in real memory and how much was in swap"). OK the graph is a nice to have, the data would suffice.

      Yeah, while true; do; ps -Fp3325 >> data.txt;sleep 1;done but I'm looking for something... Enterprise... I hate that word.

      --
      Yours Sincerely, Michael.
  2. 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.

  3. Re:Remote realtime monitoring? by ajayrockrock · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use gkrellm2 (www.gkrellm.net) to monitor a handful of machines. It has a ton of stats that you can use and it's very helpful...

    --Ajay

  4. Test Tools by frobisch · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is a good summary of available performance/test tools for Linux:
    Linux Test Tool Matrix