Linux System Performance Monitoring Tool

The sysstat (System Statistics) package contains various utilities to monitor the performance and usage of system activities. 

This tool should not be missed out to install in Linux system, and it is the must have system administrator monitoring utility for any flavor of Linux system in production.
Following are the  utilities included in sysstat package.

  1. sar – Collect, report, or save system activity information (CPU, Memory, Disks, Interrupts, Network Interfaces, TTY, Kernel tables etc.)
  2. iostat – Report statistics of CPU, I/O for devices, Partition and Network Filesystem
  3. mpstat – Individual or collective processor statistics
  4. pidstat – Reports tasks, I/O, CPU, Memory etc.
  5. nfsiostat – Reports I/O statistics for NFS
  6. cifsiostat – Reports I/O statistics for CIFS.
Below are the sysstat key features.
  • Input/Output and transfer rate statistics (global, per device, per partition, per network filesystem and per PID)
  • CPU statistics (Global, per CPU, per NUMA nodes, per PID)
  • Memory,hugepages and swap space usage and statistics
  • Virtual memory, paging and fault statistics
  • Interrupt statistics
  • Fibre channel traffic statistics
  • NFS server client activity
  • TTY devices activity
  • Filesystem usage (inodes and blocks)
  • Power management statistics
Pre-requisites:
1. Install pre-requisites packages with following commands. This will install the gcc* and other required packages for sysstat.
$  sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install build-essential
2. sudo / super user access
3. Internet to download the sysstat utility
4. Installation of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS version
5. Installation of CentOS 8 

 

sysstat package is available in default repository but it has the older version. If you are happy with the bit older version, use the package manager command below to install the package.
$ sudo apt install sysstat
 sysstat version 12.3.1 was released on 27th, December 2019. If you want to install the latest version of sysstat version to be install in you system. Please follow the below steps. We will perform the manual installation of this version in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server version. 
Step 1: Download the latest sysstat package from below URL or you may use wget command as below.
Dowload sysstat package from here.
$ wget http://pagesperso-orange.fr/sebastien.godard/sysstat-12.3.1.tar.gz

Step 2: Go to the directory from you have downloaded the sysstat package and follow the below steps one by one to install the utility from source.

$ tar -xvf sysstat-12.3.1.tar.gz
$ cd sysstat-12.3.1
$ ./configure
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install

Step 3: Successfully Installed the sysstat utility.
Verify the version with below command.
$ mpstat -V

Step 4: We have executed SAR command to find CPU and it’s CORE usage as below.

Step 5: If you would like to remove the sysstat package from the system. Simply execute the following command.
$ sudo apt remove sysstat
That’s it. In this post, we have seen the installation of sysstat package in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server version. Kindly share it and comment through comment box below in any query. Please visit for more information on sysstat official page.

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