Comments on: 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know

By: vijay

vijay — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:30:23 +0000

its so usefulllll thanks a lot

By: Solo

Solo — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:40:42 +0000

OMG !

Amazing – Super – Ultra nice info . THX pinguins !

By: deepu

deepu — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:31:50 +0000

it is a very good and resourceful infomation.

By: Tarek

Tarek — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:18:02 +0000

Actually where I work we have and isa server acting as a proxy/firewall, which prevent me from monitoring internet traffic consumption. so i installed debian as a network bridge between the isa server and the lan, and equipped it with various monitoring tools (bandwidthd, ntop, vnstat, iftop, iptraf, darkstat).

By: AD

AD — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:23:55 +0000

Thank you very much,,,….
This information is very useful for me to monitoring my server…

By: JK

JK — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:43:01 +0000

Hiii vivek,
Do you know any application to shut down a ubuntu 9.1 machine when one of its network interface is down..I need it for clustering..

By: Visigoth

Visigoth — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:11:16 +0000

I like the saidar tool, and iptstate. Check them out.

By: kirankumarl

kirankumarl — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:26:22 +0000

Dear sir pls send me some linex pdf file by wich i can learn how to install & maintanes

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:01:55 +0000

Only allow authenticated email users to send an email. There are other things too such as anti-spam, ssl keys, domain keys and much more.

By: mtituh Alu

mtituh Alu — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:09:34 +0000

I have a postfix mail server, recently through tcpdump I see alot of traffic to dc.mx.aol.com, fedExservices.com, wi.rr.com, mx1.dixie-net.com. I believe my mail server is spamming. How do I find out it is spamming? and how do I stop it. Please help.

By: Mark Seger

Mark Seger — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:36:04 +0000

re mysql – it’s not necessarily that straight forward. I was working with someone who had a system with mysql that was crawling. it was taking multiple seconds for vi to echo a single character! we ran collectl on it and could see low cpu, low network and low disk i/o. Lots of available memory, so what gives? A close look showed me that even those the I/O rates were low, the average request sizes were also real low – probably do so small db requests.

digging even deeper with collectl I saw the i/o request service times were multiple seconds! in other words when you requested an I/O operation not matter how fast the disk is, it took over 2 second to complete and that’s why vi was so slow, it was trying to write to it’s backing store.

bottom line – running a single tool and only looking at one thing does not tell the whole story. you need to see multiple things AND see them at the same time.

-mark

By: met00

met00 — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:15:03 +0000

If you are running a web server and you have multiple clients writing code, you will one day see CPU slow to a crawl. “Why?”, you will ask. ps -ef and top will show that mysql is eating up resources…

HMM?

If only there was a tool which showed me what command was being issued against the database…

mytop

Once you find the select statement that has mysql running at 99% of the CPU, you can kill the query and then go chase down the client and kill them too (or in my case bill them at $250/hr for fixing their code).

By: Serg

Serg — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:09:24 +0000

hi Mark

absolutely agreed with you mate! if you are the sysadmin something – you will do it for yourself and do it right!
These tools like ps,top and other is commonly used by users who administrated a non-productive or desktop systems or for some users who’s temporary came to the system and who needed to get a little bit of information about the box – and its pretty good enough for them. )

By: miles

miles — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:58:03 +0000

Amr El-Sharnoby:
atop is awesome, thanks for the tip.

By: Mark Seger

Mark Seger — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:38:41 +0000

This is indeed an impressive collection of tools but I still have to ask if people are really happy with having to know so many names, so many switches and so many formats. If you run one command and see something weird doesn’t it bother you if you have to run a different tool but the anomaly already passed and you can no longer see it with a different tool? For example if you see a drop in network performance and wonder if there was a memory or cpu problem, it’s too late to go back and see what else was going on. I know it bothers me. Again, by running collectl I never have to worry about that because it collects everything (when run as a deamon) or you can just tell it to report lots of things when running interactively and by default is shows cpu, disk and network. If you want to add memory, you can always include it but you will need a wider screen to see the output.

As a curiosity for those who run sar – I never do – what do you use for a monitoring interval? The default is to take 10 minute samples which I find quite worthless – remember sar has been around forever dating back to when cpus were much slower and monitoring much more expensive. I’d recommend to run sar with a 10 second sampling level like collectl and you’ll get far more out of it. The number of situations which this would be too much of a load on your system would be extremely rare. Anyone care to comment?

-mark

By: Ganesan AS

Ganesan AS — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:53:20 +0000

Good info. Thanks for sharing.
May GOD bless you to do more.

By: Bhagyesh Dhamecha

Bhagyesh Dhamecha — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:58:46 +0000

Dear all Members,

Thanks for sharing all your knowledge about Linux.. i really thankful for your share linux tips..!!

thanks and continue this jurny…as well

thank you..

By: Giriraaj

Giriraaj — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:38:47 +0000

Thanks for sharing most resourceful information.

By: sekar

sekar — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:16:44 +0000

it is cool

By: Shrik

Shrik — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:58:14 +0000

Thank you very much VERY GOOD WEBSITE