How to use sar for monitoring your Linux system? sysstat sar examples and usage

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This article describes how to install and use sar (sysstat) a system performance tools for Linux. It comes with plenty of sar examples and usage. Sar is part of the sysstat package. According to the package description it includes the following system performance tools:

• sar: collects and reports system activity information;
• iostat: reports CPU utilization and disk I/O statistics;
• mpstat: reports global and per-processor statistics;
• pidstat: reports statistics for Linux tasks (processes);
• sadf: displays data collected by sar in various formats.

Using sar you can monitor performance of various Linux subsystems (CPU, Memory, I/O..) in real time. You can also collect all performance data on an on-going basis, store them, and do historical analysis to identify bottlenecks. 

What SAR can do?

In this article I will demonstrate how to install and configure sysstat package (which contains sar utility) and explains how to monitor the following Linux performance statistics using sar.

• Collective CPU usage
• Individual CPU statistics
• Memory used and available
• Swap space used and available
• Overall I/O activities of the system
• Individual device I/O activities
• Context switch statistics
• Run queue and load average data
• Network statistics
• Report sar data from a specific time

The statistics reported by sar deal with I/O transfer rates, paging activity, process-related activities, interrupts, network activity, memory and swap space utilization, CPU utilization, kernel activities and TTY statistics, among others. Both UP and SMP machines are fully supported.


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