Detecting CPU Usage
 

Hi,

How would I go about researching why my server became un-responsive? A tech restarted the machine. When I ran 'uptime' I could see the load was very high from before it was rebooted. Where can I go to try to figure out what process was running before that caused it to use so much cpu?

Thanks
Mark

Uptime shows the average usage in the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

If statistics weren't being kept in the past, I doubt you can find that the problem was before rebooting, unless some error message was logged.
You might look in /var/log/messages to see where the last messages came from.

You could run top in batch mode and redirect the output to a file. Other common tools include vmstat, procinfo, mpstat & oprofile (opcontrol/opreport).

You might want to monitor and log the performance statistics over a certain test period of time in the future. Some of the tools, like vmstat can suppress the headers so that the data can be loaded into a spreadsheet.

Good Luck.

Basically that's the deal.
For the future, look at sysstat - keeps a history log.