Forgotten SysStat

:: sysadmin, system, linux

By: Maciej Barć

SysStat is a amazing tool. In the age where telegraf and grafana are all the rage everybody forgot about the good old sysstat.

Selected command examples

  • iostat -d -p nvme0n1 3 - disk I/O for a NVME drive (nvme0n1),
  • sar -n DEV 3 - network throughput,
  • sar -h -r 3 - memory usage,
  • sar -P ALL 3 - CPU utlization
  • sar -q 3 - system load levels,
  • sar -A 3 - all the metrics.

Gathered info

qlist app-admin/sysstat | grep /usr/bin/

The app-admin/sysstat contains the following binaries and their respective statictic fields:

  • sar - general utilization statistics,
  • cifsiostat - CIFS,
  • iostat - device input/output,
  • mpstat - processors,
  • pidstat - Linux tasks,
  • tapestat - tape (yes, the real tape disks).

Installation

Gentoo

emerge --noreplace --verbose sys-process/cronie app-admin/sysstat
rc-service cronie start
rc-update add cronie default

Files

By default (on Gentoo): * sa (the collector) saves statistics to /var/log/sa, * /etc/sysstat is the configuration file * cron jobs are run via the *system* cronjob table.