Monitoring With Sysstats

The SYSSTATS utilities are a collection of monitoring tools for linux. They come with almost every Linux distribution and most unix people are confident wit sar/iostat/pidstat, etc. Those utilities are precious when you need to have quick look at the system via command line.

When the automatic data collection is enabled the data is kept in /var/log/sysstat/ or where has been defined on SA_DIR in the sysstat configuration. The data will be rotated according to the HISTORY parameter.

Recent versions of sysstats have a version of sadf that can generate svg images of the monitoring, uploading them to a website can give a quick view of the system.

Here is “one line” script that can be managed by cron:

sadf script