[Question] System activity report

waqasdaar · 03-28-2010, 09:36 AM

Hi,
Currently I an involved in a research project. and I have to monitor the system resources (like cpu utilization, bandwidth utilization, hard disk utilization etc.) during an experiment, when we invoke some application. I googled the query and found that "System Activity Report (sar)" can provide all the information which I am currently interested. But I have no idea how to utilize this utility and how can I plot it on a graph. If you have some information regarding that then please let me know.

Or If you know some other tools/utilities that can be deployed to retrieve all these information and can easily be plotted on a graph. I will be very grateful to you.

Please don't mention these monitoring software like cacti, mrtg, nagious. I am looking for other tools.

Thanks in Advanced.

tommcd · 03-28-2010, 10:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by waqasdaar

... I have to monitor the system resources ... I googled the query and found that "System Activity Report (sar)" can provide all the information which I am currently interested. But I have no idea how to utilize this utility and how can I plot it on a graph. If you have some information regarding that then please let me know.

Some quick googling to the rescue to learn about sar:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/52570
http://linux.die.net/man/1/sar
On Ubuntu, if you run:

Code:

aptitude search sar

This will be at the top of the output:

Code:

p   atsar  - system activity reporter

And running:

Code:

aptitude show atsar

reports (in part):

Code:

...
Description: system activity reporter
 Monitor system resources such as CPU, network, memory & disk I/O, and record
 data for later analysis

So try installing atsar from the Ubuntu repos, and see if it is what will suit your needs.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?ke...ic&section=all
(Your profile currently says that you are runnng Ubuntu. This is why I suggested installing atsar from the Ubuntu repos).

Quote:

Originally Posted by waqasdaar

Or If you know some other tools/utilities that can be deployed to retrieve all these information and can easily be plotted on a graph. I will be very grateful to you.

There are of course the basic tools like top for CPU and memory utilization, free for memory usage, and netstat for network monitoring. There are many others also. I like using the lightweight GUI program gkrellm to monitor system resources.