One of the most important aspects of managing your linux virtual server , is to know what exactly your server is up to at any one time.

Being on top of this allows you to tweak your server for better performance dynamically before your load times start to suffer.

You should look out for issues Including:

• Storage bottlenecks
• CPU and Memory Bottlenecks
• Network Bottlenecks

All these have the ability to slow down and undermine the performance of your server. Below i will provide some free/opensource monitoring tools you can use to access this information via the command line on your linux server.

1. Uptime – see how long your server has been running.

The uptime command can be used to see how long the server has been running. The current time, how long the system has been running, how many users are currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

# uptime

OutPut Example:

16:15:17 up 88 days, 9 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

2. Top – Process Activity

The top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system i.e. actual process activity. By default, it displays the most CPU-intensive tasks running on the server and updates the list every five seconds.

3. Vmstat – System Activity, Hardware and System Information
The command vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and cpu activity.

# vmstat 3

OutPut Example

procs ———–memory———- —swap– —–io—- -system– —-cpu—-
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
1 0 27044 6608 116432 47620 0 0 0 2 1 5 0 0 100 0
0 0 27044 6604 116432 47644 0 0 0 0 253 12 0 0 100 0
0 0 27044 6604 116432 47644 0 0 0 4 256 17 0 0 100 0

4- Find Out Who Is Logged on And What They Are Doing

w command displays information about the users currently on the machine, and their processes

# w username
# w vivek

5- free – Memory Usage

The command free displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap memory in the system, as well as the buffers used by the kernel.

# free

6- iostat – Average CPU Load, Disk Activity

The command iostat report Central Processing Unit (CPU) statistics and input/output statistics for devices, partitions and network filesystems (NFS).

# iostat

Tags: Add new tag, Central processing unit, Computer data storage, Load, Server

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 4:24 pm and is filed under cloud, infrastructure, LAMP, Linux, tutorials, virtual servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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