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A question about SAR (System Activity Report) command

Hello,
I use Debian and installed sysstat, then I activated and executed SAR using the following commands:

Code:

# systemctl enable sysstat

#

# systemctl start sysstat

This program created the file /var/log/sysstat/sa21. I want to know if SAR is automatically recording system activities or need to write cron file?

Thank you.

I'm not on Debian and we don't have systemd, but here I have to start the collector and tell it when to run via a startup script. Fcron runs reports at various times. The script that comes with it leaves much to be desired so I wrote a different one.

Here's systab's fcron tab snippet for sar:

Code:

# Enter a "Restart" mark in the logfile for sadc and make sure that

# logfile is created just after midnight each day so that the 'sar'

# command with always produce output instead of 'file not found'

& 1 0 * * * /usr/lib64/sa/sadc -



# Generate a summary of process accounting each midnight

# This is only the report generation, and is still needed.

%nightly * 23 /usr/lib64/sa/sa2 -A

The part of the script that runs sadc:

Code:

/usr/lib64/sa/sadc -

/usr/lib64/sa/sadc -F -S XALL -L ${sample_rate} - &

where sample_rate is settable. Currently I have it at 900.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jayjwa (Post 6485040)

Code:

# Enter a "Restart" mark in the logfile for sadc and make sure that

# logfile is created just after midnight each day so that the 'sar'

# command with always produce output instead of 'file not found'

& 1 0 * * * /usr/lib64/sa/sadc -



# Generate a summary of process accounting each midnight

# This is only the report generation, and is still needed.

%nightly * 23 /usr/lib64/sa/sa2 -A

The part of the script that runs sadc:

Code:

/usr/lib64/sa/sadc -

/usr/lib64/sa/sadc -F -S XALL -L ${sample_rate} - &

where sample_rate is settable. Currently I have it at 900.

Hello,
Thank you so much for your reply.
Do you think it is necessary to write a cron file on Debian?

If you don't care about the report file, then I'd say you don't need it. See the 'sa2' man page about that.

It records automatically. Just make sure Enabled is True in the file /etc/default/sysstat
Restart sysstat after updating it.
sudo systemctl restart sysstat

Historical files are found in /var/log/systat, filename with day.

You can check the statistics of that day.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eklavya (Post 6486535)

Hello,
Thank you so much for you reply.
I have some questions:

1- In the /etc/default/sysstat file, the value was ENABLED="false", but the report was generated for each day. Why?

2- There are two types of files in the /var/log/systat directory, some starting with sa and some starting with sar. What is their difference?

Code:

sa01  sa23  sa25  sa27  sa29  sar22  sar24  sar26  sar28  

sa02  sa24  sa26  sa28  sar01  sar23  sar25  sar27  sar29

3- What is the usage of sysstat-collect service?