Article Summary: This article provides information on how to use System Activity Report, 'sar', to view performance information on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11.
Table of Contents:
1. Installation
2. Configure logging
3. Usage of the 'sar' command
1. Installation
- Ensure you are logged in as 'root'
- 'sar' is apart of the 'sysstat' package
- # yast2 -i sysstat
- Create a symlink for the cron job :
- # ln -s /etc/sysstat/sysstat.cron /etc/cron.d/sysstat.cron
- Restart cron service :
- # rccron restart
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2. Configure logging
- Edit '/etc/sysstat/sysstat' with your favorite editor
- Find the line that starts with 'HISTORY='
- The value represents the number of days to retain log files
- The default is sixty days and you can change it to meet your needs
- Log files will be stored in the '/var/log/sa' directory
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3. Usage of the 'sar' command
NOTE : It will take at least 10 minutes for the cron job to be executed to gather data so that this command can be utilized
- Display the current day's :
:
- # sar
- To specify a CPU, for example CPU 3 :
- Queue length and average statistics :
- RAM statistics :
- # sar -r
- # sar -R
- # sar -b
- # sar -c
- # sar -B
- # sar -d
- # sar -n NAME
- Replace NAME with one of the following :
- ALL – This displays all of the above information
- DEV – Displays network devices vital statistics
- EDEV – Display network device failure statistics
- EICMP – Displays ICMPv4 network errors
- EIP – Displays IPv4 network errors
- EIP6 – Displays IPv6 network errors
- ETCP – Displays TCPv4 network errors
- ICMP – Displays ICMPv4 network traffic
- ICMP6 – Displays ICMPv6 network traffic
- IP – Displays IPv4 network traffic
- IP6 – Displays IPv6 network traffic
- NFS – Displays NFS client activities
- NFSD – Displays NFS server activities
- SOCK – Displays sockets in use for IPv4
- SOCK6 – Displays sockets in use for IPv6
- TCP – Displays TCPv4 network traffic
- UDP – Displays UDPv4 network traffic
- UDP6 - Displays UDPv6 network traffic
- Swap space utilization :
- Disk statistics :
- Process creation statistics :
- Paging statistics :
- Block device statistics :
- Network statistics :
- Inode statistics :
- Swapping statistics :
- # sar -W
- # sar -w
- System switching statistics :
- Real time information can be displayed as well by adding interval and integer arguments :
- Example : Display CPU statistics every five seconds a total of ten times
- # sar 5 10
- By default the 'sar' command display's the current day's statistics, but you can change that by use the switches -s for start and -e for end
- Example : # sar -s 12:00:00 -e 16:00:00
- This will display the CPU statistics for today between noon and 4PM
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