Linux Server Performance Monitoring

Question

I'm looking to monitor performance on my Linux servers (which happen to be Centos). What are the best tools for monitoring things in realtime such as:

Disk Performance I/O, swapping etc..
CPU Performance

Looking for low level tools, rather than web based tools such as Nagios, Ganglia etc...

n.b. I'd like to know exactly what each tool does rather than just having a list of random toolnames if possible please. Why the tool is a better option than others would be good also.

score 12 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 15 '09 at 17:59

12

iostat, sar, top, munin

answered Oct 15 '09 at 17:59

Ali Mezgani

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Simple and to the point, I like it! – Dave Drager Oct 15 '09 at 18:01
+1 for munin, very easy to setup and use. – emills Oct 15 '09 at 21:16

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 15 '09 at 21:27

5

collectl is a great performance monitor with some unique and advanced features like InfiniBand and Lustre support or environmental and NFS monitoring. Of course it does basic stuff like disk and cpu monitoring, too. Highly recommended!

answered Oct 15 '09 at 21:27

knweiss

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This is pretty cool, used it tonight on some disk I/O monitoring... working well... thanks for the suggestion... – Jon Oct 16 '09 at 01:54

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 29 '10 at 10:49

I've recently release collectl-utils which provided graphing capabilities for collectl data with a web-based tool called colplot. The one key thing with this accuracy. Using gnuplot for the the graphics it's very fast and shows every data point, unlike RRD which 'normalizes' your data. -mark

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 07 '10 at 11:12

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If you want graph easy your Linux performance, try Bijk.com:

Open source tool with web access and live graphs! http://www.bijk.com

answered Oct 07 '10 at 11:12

original question "Looking for low level tools, rather than web based tools" – Sirex Oct 07 '10 at 11:43

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 24 '12 at 14:26

Use atop, that will give you percentage of how much each resource is busy. Also it color codes data and if something is botteling out system resources it will color code those entries.

In CentOS you can install it from EPEL/RPMForge repos.

//Christian

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 14 '13 at 13:59

I can see that you are looking for low level tools. But you might want to rethink as I believe performance monitoring is a regular exercise. From my experience I can tell how difficult it can become if you don't use dedicated tools. These are the tools I came across.

steveha · Answer 7 · 2009-10-15T19:36:56.087

Doing a Google search for "linux monitoring tools", you find some stuff.

One of the good links found: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html This article tells you what each tool does, and will give you an idea why one tool is better than another for a particular purpose.

The tools mezgani recommended are listed in that article, except Munin. Munin doesn't seem to be what you are looking for anyway (it is web-based and you specifically said you didn't want web-based).

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Oct 15 '09 at 20:21

u can check same of very useful tool of open source.

http://studyhat.blogspot.com/2009/10/linux-system-monitoring-tools-every.html

http://studyhat.blogspot.com/2009/10/linux-limit-cpu-usage-per-process.html

http://studyhat.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-do-i-find-out-linux-cpu-utilization.html

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Oct 16 '09 at 14:14

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If you want decent historical data graphing, especially for multiple systems, check out Cacti. It requires configuring SNMP on each system (easy).

answered Oct 16 '09 at 14:14

Kyle Smith

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Linux Server Performance Monitoring

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