20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every Sysadmin Should Know - Nixcraft

10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

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nixCraft 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know

by nixCraft on June 27, 2009 · 344 comments· LAST UPDATED January 1, 2014

in CentOS, Debian Linux, fedora linux

Need to monitor Linux server performance? Try these built-in commands and a few add-on tools. Most Linux distributions are equipped with tons of monitoring. These tools provide metrics which can be used to get information about system activities. You can use these tools to find the possible causes of a performance problem. The commands discussed below are some of the most basic commands when it comes to system analysis and debugging server issues such as:

1. Finding out bottlenecks. 2. Disk (storage) bottlenecks. 3. CPU and memory bottlenecks. 4. Network bottlenecks.

#1: top - Process Activity Command

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.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 1/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

Fig.01: Linux top command

Commonly Used Hot Keys

The top command provides several useful hot keys:

Hot Usage Key t Displays summary information off and on. m Displays memory information off and on. Sorts the display by top consumers of various system resources. Useful for quick identification of A performance-hungry tasks on a system. f Enters an interactive configuration screen for top. Helpful for setting up top for a specific task. o Enables you to interactively select the ordering within top. r Issues renice command. k Issues kill command. z Turn on or off color/mono

=> Related: How do I Find Out Linux CPU Utilization? #2: vmstat - System Activity, Hardware and System Information

The command vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and cpu activity. # vmstat 3 Sample Outputs:

procs ------memory------swap------io------system------cpu------r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 2/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 0 0 0 2540988 522188 5130400 0 0 2 32 4 2 4 1 96 0 0 1 0 0 2540988 522188 5130400 0 0 0 720 1199 665 1 0 99 0 0 0 0 0 2540956 522188 5130400 0 0 0 0 1151 1569 4 1 95 0 0 0 0 0 2540956 522188 5130500 0 0 0 6 1117 439 1 0 99 0 0 0 0 0 2540940 522188 5130512 0 0 0 536 1189 932 1 0 98 0 0 0 0 0 2538444 522188 5130588 0 0 0 0 1187 1417 4 1 96 0 0 0 0 0 2490060 522188 5130640 0 0 0 18 1253 1123 5 1 94 0 0

Display Memory Utilization Slabinfo

# vmstat -m

Get Information About Active / Inactive Memory Pages

# vmstat -a => Related: How do I find out Linux Resource utilization to detect system bottlenecks? #3: w - 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 Sample Outputs:

17:58:47 up 5 days, 20:28, 2 users, load average: 0.36, 0.26, 0.24 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT root pts/0 10.1.3.145 14:55 5.00s 0.04s 0.02s vim /etc/resolv.conf root pts/1 10.1.3.145 17:43 0.00s 0.03s 0.00s w

#4: uptime - Tell How Long The System 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:

18:02:41 up 41 days, 23:42, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

1 can be considered as optimal load value. The load can change from system to system. For a single CPU system 1 - 3 and SMP systems 6-10 load value might be acceptable. #5: ps - Displays The Processes

ps command will report a snapshot of the current processes. To select all processes use the -A or -e option: # ps -A Sample Outputs:

PID TTY TIME CMD 1 ? 00:00:02 init http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 3/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 2 ? 00:00:02 migration/0 3 ? 00:00:01 ksoftirqd/0 4 ? 00:00:00 watchdog/0 5 ? 00:00:00 migration/1 6 ? 00:00:15 ksoftirqd/1 ...... 4881 ? 00:53:28 java 4885 tty1 00:00:00 mingetty 4886 tty2 00:00:00 mingetty 4887 tty3 00:00:00 mingetty 4888 tty4 00:00:00 mingetty 4891 tty5 00:00:00 mingetty 4892 tty6 00:00:00 mingetty 4893 ttyS1 00:00:00 agetty 12853 ? 00:00:00 cifsoplockd 12854 ? 00:00:00 cifsdnotifyd 14231 ? 00:10:34 lighttpd 14232 ? 00:00:00 php-cgi 54981 pts/0 00:00:00 vim 55465 ? 00:00:00 php-cgi 55546 ? 00:00:00 bind9-snmp-stat 55704 pts/1 00:00:00 ps

ps is just like top but provides more information.

Show Long Format Output

# ps -Al To turn on extra full mode (it will show command line arguments passed to process): # ps -AlF

To See Threads ( LWP and NLWP)

# ps -AlFH

To See Threads After Processes

# ps -AlLm

Print All Process On The Server

# ps ax # ps axu

Print A Process Tree

# ps -ejH # ps axjf # pstree

Print Security Information http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 4/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft # ps -eo euser,ruser,suser,fuser,f,comm,label # ps axZ # ps -eM

See Every Process Running As User Vivek

# ps -U vivek -u vivek u

Set Output In a User-Defined Format

# ps -eo pid,tid,class,rtprio,ni,pri,psr,pcpu,stat,wchan:14,comm # ps axo stat,euid,ruid,tty,tpgid,sess,pgrp,ppid,pid,pcpu,comm # ps -eopid,tt,user,fname,tmout,f,wchan

Display Only The Process IDs of Lighttpd

# ps -C lighttpd -o pid= OR # pgrep lighttpd OR # pgrep -u vivek php-cgi

Display The Name of PID 55977

# ps -p 55977 -o comm=

Find Out The Top 10 Memory Consuming Process

# ps -auxf | sort -nr -k 4 | head -10

Find Out top 10 CPU Consuming Process

# ps -auxf | sort -nr -k 3 | head -10 #6: 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 Sample Output:

total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 12302896 9739664 2563232 0 523124 5154740 -/+ buffers/cache: 4061800 8241096 Swap: 1052248 0 1052248

=> Related: :

1. Linux Find Out Virtual Memory PAGESIZE http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 5/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 2. Linux Limit CPU Usage Per Process 3. How much RAM does my Ubuntu / Fedora Linux desktop PC have? #7: 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 Sample Outputs:

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 (www03.nixcraft.in) 06/26/2009 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 3.50 0.09 0.51 0.03 0.00 95.86 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn sda 22.04 31.88 512.03 16193351 260102868 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 2166 180 sda2 22.04 31.87 512.03 16189010 260102688 sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 1615 0

=> Related: : Linux Track NFS Directory / Disk I/O Stats #8: sar - Collect and Report System Activity

The sar command is used to collect, report, and save system activity information. To see network counter, enter: # sar -n DEV | more To display the network counters from the 24th: # sar -n DEV -f /var/log/sa/sa24 | more You can also display real time usage using sar: # sar 4 5 Sample Outputs:

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 (www03.nixcraft.in) 06/26/2009 06:45:12 PM CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 06:45:16 PM all 2.00 0.00 0.22 0.00 0.00 97.78 06:45:20 PM all 2.07 0.00 0.38 0.03 0.00 97.52 06:45:24 PM all 0.94 0.00 0.28 0.00 0.00 98.78 06:45:28 PM all 1.56 0.00 0.22 0.00 0.00 98.22 06:45:32 PM all 3.53 0.00 0.25 0.03 0.00 96.19 Average: all 2.02 0.00 0.27 0.01 0.00 97.70

=> Related: : How to collect Linux system utilization data into a file #9: mpstat - Multiprocessor Usage

The mpstat command displays activities for each available processor, processor 0 being the first one. mpstat -P ALL to display average CPU utilization per processor: # mpstat -P ALL Sample Output:

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 (www03.nixcraft.in) 06/26/2009 06:48:11 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 6/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 06:48:11 PM all 3.50 0.09 0.34 0.03 0.01 0.17 0.00 95.86 1218.04 06:48:11 PM 0 3.44 0.08 0.31 0.02 0.00 0.12 0.00 96.04 1000.31 06:48:11 PM 1 3.10 0.08 0.32 0.09 0.02 0.11 0.00 96.28 34.93 06:48:11 PM 2 4.16 0.11 0.36 0.02 0.00 0.11 0.00 95.25 0.00 06:48:11 PM 3 3.77 0.11 0.38 0.03 0.01 0.24 0.00 95.46 44.80 06:48:11 PM 4 2.96 0.07 0.29 0.04 0.02 0.10 0.00 96.52 25.91 06:48:11 PM 5 3.26 0.08 0.28 0.03 0.01 0.10 0.00 96.23 14.98 06:48:11 PM 6 4.00 0.10 0.34 0.01 0.00 0.13 0.00 95.42 3.75 06:48:11 PM 7 3.30 0.11 0.39 0.03 0.01 0.46 0.00 95.69 76.89

=> Related: : Linux display each multiple SMP CPU processors utilization individually. #10: pmap - Process Memory Usage

The command pmap report memory map of a process. Use this command to find out causes of memory bottlenecks. # pmap -d PID To display process memory information for pid # 47394, enter: # pmap -d 47394 Sample Outputs:

47394: /usr/bin/php-cgi Address Kbytes Mode Offset Device Mapping 0000000000400000 2584 r-x-- 0000000000000000 008:00002 php-cgi 0000000000886000 140 rw--- 0000000000286000 008:00002 php-cgi 00000000008a9000 52 rw--- 00000000008a9000 000:00000 [ anon ] 0000000000aa8000 76 rw--- 00000000002a8000 008:00002 php-cgi 000000000f678000 1980 rw--- 000000000f678000 000:00000 [ anon ] 000000314a600000 112 r-x-- 0000000000000000 008:00002 ld-2.5.so 000000314a81b000 4 r---- 000000000001b000 008:00002 ld-2.5.so 000000314a81c000 4 rw--- 000000000001c000 008:00002 ld-2.5.so 000000314aa00000 1328 r-x-- 0000000000000000 008:00002 libc-2.5.so 000000314ab4c000 2048 ----- 000000000014c000 008:00002 libc-2.5.so ...... 00002af8d48fd000 4 rw--- 0000000000006000 008:00002 xsl.so 00002af8d490c000 40 r-x-- 0000000000000000 008:00002 libnss_files-2.5.so 00002af8d4916000 2044 ----- 000000000000a000 008:00002 libnss_files-2.5.so 00002af8d4b15000 4 r---- 0000000000009000 008:00002 libnss_files-2.5.so 00002af8d4b16000 4 rw--- 000000000000a000 008:00002 libnss_files-2.5.so 00002af8d4b17000 768000 rw-s- 0000000000000000 000:00009 zero (deleted) 00007fffc95fe000 84 rw--- 00007ffffffea000 000:00000 [ stack ] ffffffffff600000 8192 ----- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ] mapped: 933712K writeable/private: 4304K shared: 768000K

The last line is very important:

mapped: 933712K total amount of memory mapped to files writeable/private: 4304K the amount of private address space shared: 768000K the amount of address space this process is sharing with others

=> Related: : Linux find the memory used by a program / process using pmap command #11 and #12: netstat and ss - Network Statistics http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 7/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft The command netstat displays network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, masquerade connections, and multicast memberships. ss command is used to dump socket statistics. It allows showing information similar to netstat. See the following resources about ss and netstat commands:

ss: Display Linux TCP / UDP Network and Socket Information Get Detailed Information About Particular IP address Connections Using netstat Command #13: iptraf - Real-time Network Statistics

The iptraf command is interactive colorful IP LAN monitor. It is an ncurses-based IP LAN monitor that generates various network statistics including TCP info, UDP counts, ICMP and OSPF information, Ethernet load info, node stats, IP checksum errors, and others. It can provide the following info in easy to read format:

Network traffic statistics by TCP connection IP traffic statistics by network interface Network traffic statistics by protocol Network traffic statistics by TCP/UDP port and by packet size Network traffic statistics by Layer2 address

Fig.02: General interface statistics: IP traffic statistics by network interface

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Fig.03 Network traffic statistics by TCP connection #14: tcpdump - Detailed Network Traffic Analysis

The tcpdump is simple command that dump traffic on a network. However, you need good understanding of TCP/IP protocol to utilize this tool. For.e.g to display traffic info about DNS, enter: # tcpdump -i eth1 'udp port 53' To display all IPv4 HTTP packets to and from port 80, i.e. print only packets that contain data, not, for example, SYN and FIN packets and ACK-only packets, enter: # tcpdump 'tcp port 80 and (((ip[2:2] - ((ip[0]&0xf)<<2)) - ((tcp[12]&0xf0)>>2)) != 0)' To display all FTP session to 202.54.1.5, enter: # tcpdump -i eth1 'dst 202.54.1.5 and (port 21 or 20' To display all HTTP session to 192.168.1.5: # tcpdump -ni eth0 'dst 192.168.1.5 and tcp and port http' Use wireshark to view detailed information about files, enter: # tcpdump -n -i eth1 -s 0 -w output.txt src or dst port 80 #15: strace - System Calls

Trace system calls and signals. This is useful for debugging webserver and other server problems. See how to use to trace the process and see What it is doing. #16: /Proc file system - Various Kernel Statistics

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 9/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft /proc file system provides detailed information about various hardware devices and other Linux kernel information. See Linux kernel /proc documentations for further details. Common /proc examples: # cat /proc/cpuinfo # cat /proc/meminfo # cat /proc/zoneinfo # cat /proc/mounts 17#: Nagios - Server And Network Monitoring

Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software. You can easily monitor all your hosts, network equipment and services. It can send alert when things go wrong and again when they get better. FAN is "Fully Automated Nagios". FAN goals are to provide a Nagios installation including most tools provided by the Nagios Community. FAN provides a CDRom image in the standard ISO format, making it easy to easilly install a Nagios server. Added to this, a wide bunch of tools are including to the distribution, in order to improve the user experience around Nagios. 18#: Cacti - Web-based Monitoring Tool

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices. It can provide data about network, CPU, memory, logged in users, Apache, DNS servers and much more. See how to install and configure Cacti network graphing tool under CentOS / RHEL. #19: KDE System Guard - Real-time Systems Reporting and Graphing

KSysguard is a network enabled task and system monitor application for KDE desktop. This tool can be run over ssh session. It provides lots of features such as a client/server architecture that enables monitoring of local and remote hosts. The graphical front end uses so-called sensors to retrieve the information it displays. A sensor can return simple values or more complex information like tables. For each type of information, one or more displays are provided. Displays are organized in worksheets that can be saved and loaded independently from each other. So, KSysguard is not only a simple task manager but also a very powerful tool to control large server farms.

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Fig.05 KDE System Guard {Image credit: Wikipedia}

See the KSysguard handbook for detailed usage. #20: Gnome System Monitor - Real-time Systems Reporting and Graphing

The System Monitor application enables you to display basic system information and monitor system processes, usage of system resources, and file systems. You can also use System Monitor to modify the behavior of your system. Although not as powerful as the KDE System Guard, it provides the basic information which may be useful for new users:

Displays various basic information about the computer's hardware and software. Linux Kernel version GNOME version Hardware Installed memory Processors and speeds System Status Currently available disk space Processes Memory and swap space Network usage http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 11/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft File Systems Lists all mounted filesystems along with basic information about each.

Fig.06 The Gnome System Monitor application Bonus: Additional Tools

A few more tools:

nmap - scan your server for open ports. lsof - list open files, network connections and much more. ntop web based tool - ntop is the best tool to see network usage in a way similar to what top command does for processes i.e. it is network traffic monitoring software. You can see network status, protocol wise distribution of traffic for UDP, TCP, DNS, HTTP and other protocols. Conky - Another good monitoring tool for the X Window System. It is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes etc. GKrellM - It can be used to monitor the status of CPUs, main memory, hard disks, network interfaces, local and remote mailboxes, and many other things. vnstat - vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor. It keeps a log of hourly, daily and monthly network traffic for the selected interface(s). htop - htop is an enhanced version of top, the interactive process viewer, which can display the list of processes in a tree form. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 12/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft mtr - mtr combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

Did I miss something? Please add your favorite system motoring tool in the comments.

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{ 344 comments… read them below or add one }

1 VonSkippy June 27, 2009 at 5:10 am

Pretty much common knowledge (or should be) but handy to have listed all in one place.

2 Jim (JR) March 21, 2011 at 3:30 am

(quote) Pretty much common knowledge. . . . (/quote)

Yea, right! I’ve been around the block two or three times – and a number of these are familiar to me – but some of the ways they’re used here were not. Also a fair number of these were absolutely brand-new – and they look damned useful!

I am so going to book-mark this page it isn’t funny! It’s likely that I will want to spread this URL around like the Flu as well. . . . :-D

@Vivek *GREAT* list – for those of us who are mere mortals. . . .

Jim (JR) http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 13/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

3 Steve August 3, 2011 at 7:28 am

For someone with the common knowledge, why would this be handy? I mean, if you already know/use these, then why would you need a page detailing them?

4 Mike Williams August 15, 2011 at 10:35 pm

Because a lot of us have to live with faulty memory modules, Steve. I do agree with you too.:This knowledge isn’t that common outside the comic book fraternity.

5 farseas January 8, 2013 at 5:29 pm

If you did a lot of sysadmin you would already know the answer to that question.

6 robb June 27, 2009 at 8:29 am

yeap most of them are must-have tools. good job of collecting them in a post.

7 Chris June 27, 2009 at 8:37 am

Nice list. For systems with just a few nodes I recommend Munin. It’s easy to install and configure. My favorite tool for monitoring a linux cluster is Ganglia.

P.S. I think you should change this “#2: vmstat – Network traffic statistics by TCP connection …”

8 ftaurino June 27, 2009 at 9:09 am

another useful tool is dstat , which combines vmstat, iostat, ifstat, netstat information and more. but this is a very useful list with some interesting examples!

9 James June 27, 2009 at 9:23 am

pocess or process. haha, i love typos

10 Sohrab Khan March 15, 2011 at 9:09 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 14/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Dear i am learning the Linux pl z help me, I you have any useful notes pl z sent it to my E- mail.

Thanks

11 vasu March 21, 2011 at 5:43 am

In my system booting time it showing error fsck is fails. plz login as root…….– how to repair or check linux os using fsck command plz help me

12 darkdragn May 31, 2011 at 7:14 am

Most of the time that happens if the fsck operation requires human interaction, which the boot fsck doesn’t have. Just restart it, if you don’t normally get a grub delay the hold down the shift key to get one, if you do then just select recovery mode, or single user mode, it depends on your distro. It’s the same thing in all, just tripping single user mode with a kernel arg, but it will let you boot, and run fsck on unmounted partitions. If it is your root partition, you may need to boot from an external medium, unless you have a kick ass initrd, lol.

13 Artur June 27, 2009 at 9:40 am

What about Munin ? Lots easier and lighter than Cacti.

14 nig belamp December 7, 2010 at 4:21 pm

How can you even compare munin to cacti…stfu your a tool.

15 PC4N6 April 20, 2011 at 7:53 pm

Uhm, geez, this isn’t blogspot. Head over there if you have an uncontrollable need to flame people above your level of understanding…

16 RB-211 May 13, 2011 at 12:57 pm

Wow, that was a bit harsh.

17 grammer nazi July 24, 2011 at 1:54 pm

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 15/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft it is you’re – you are a tool. Please when randomly slamming someones post to feel better about yourself, at least you proper grammer. Then at least you sound like an intelligent a55h0le. :P

18 Jeff August 9, 2011 at 6:07 pm

Sarcastic pro’s, N00bs, flaming, harsh language, grammar nazis. All we need now is a Hitler comparison and we have the full set. Who’s up for a ban?

Also: before stuff can become common knowledge you’ll first have to encounter it at least once. Like here in this nice list. Thanks for sharing!

19 David August 25, 2011 at 3:05 pm

A ban? Censorship! You Nazi!

20 Roberto September 9, 2011 at 6:08 pm

That’s “grammar”, unless you’re talking about the actor who plays Frasier on Cheers. :P

21 Fireman October 17, 2011 at 11:39 pm

Let me go ahead and re-write your comment, grammer nazi. It seems you have quite a few errors.

“It is ‘you’re–you are’ a tool. Please, when randomly slamming someone’s post to feel better about yourself, at least use proper grammar. Then, at least, you sound like an intelligent a55h0le.”

In the future, I would recommend proof-reading your own posts before you arrogantly correct others. I counted at least six mistakes in your “correction.” Have a nice day! :)

22 flame on! December 4, 2011 at 8:05 pm

Vivek does a great job, as usual. But, thanks for the laughs, guys!

23 Raj June 27, 2009 at 10:13 am

Nice list, worth bookmarking! http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 16/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

24 kaosmonk June 27, 2009 at 10:53 am

Once again, great article!!

25 Amr El-Sharnoby June 27, 2009 at 11:07 am

I can see that the best tool to monitor processes , CPU, memeory and disk bottleneck at once is atop …

But the tool itself can cause a lot of trouble in heavily loaded servers and it enables process accounting and has a service running all the time …

To use it efficiently on RHEL , CentOS; 1- install rpmforge repo 2- # yum install atop 3- # killalll atop 4- # chkconfig atop off 5- # rm -rf /tmp/atop.d/ /var/log/atop/ 6- then don’t directly run “atop” command , but instead run it as follows; # ATOPACCT=” atop

This tool has saved me hundreds of hours really! and helped me to diagnose bottlenecks and solve them that couldn’t otherwise be easily detected and would need many different tools

26 nixCraft June 27, 2009 at 1:01 pm

@Chris / James

Thanks for the heads-up!

27 Solaris June 27, 2009 at 1:26 pm

Great post, also great reference.

28 quba June 27, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Hi,

We have just added your latest post “20 Linux System Monitoring Tools

Every SysAdmin Should Know” to our Directory of Technology . You

can check the inclusion of the post here . We are delighted http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 17/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft to invite you to submit all your future posts to the directory and get a huge base of

visitors to your website.

Warm Regards

Techtrove.info Team

http://www.techtrove.info

29 Cristiano June 27, 2009 at 1:57 pm

You probably wanna add IFTOP tool, its really simple and light, very useful when u need to have a last moment remote access to a server to see hows the trific going.

30 Peko June 27, 2009 at 3:40 pm

Yeah, well why a so good admin (I dig(g) your site) won’t you use spelling checkers? Typo #2 Web-based __Monitioring__ Tool

31 paul tergeist June 27, 2009 at 4:17 pm

maybe it’s a typo too, but the title should be : “.. Tools Every SysAdmin MUST Know” and still, this is advanced user knowledge, at most. I would not trust a sysadmin that knows so few. And..

32 harrywwc June 27, 2009 at 10:56 pm

Hi guys,

good list – and some great submitted pointers to other useful tools.

to those carp-ing on about typo’s – give us all a break. you’ve never made a typo? ever?

Idea: How ’bout those who have never *ever* made an error in typing text be the first one(s) to give people grief about making a typo?

I _used_ to be a real PITA about this; then I grew up.

The purpose of this blog, and other forms of communication, is to *communicate* concepts and ideas. *If* you have received those clearly – in spite of the typos – then the purpose has been fulfilled.

/me gets down off his soapbox http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 18/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft .h

33 StygianAgenda February 28, 2011 at 8:49 pm

I totally second that! WTF is up with people making such a big deal about spelling? I could understand if the complaints were in regards to a misspelling of a code-example, but if the language is coherent enough to get the idea across, then that’s all that really matters.

34 Lolcatz April 7, 2011 at 10:54 pm

Typos*

35 roflcopter June 24, 2011 at 1:57 pm

Typographical error*

36 PÃ¡draig Brady June 27, 2009 at 11:37 pm

A script I use often to show the real memory usage of programs on linux, is ps_mem.py

I also summarised a few linux monitoring tools here

I’d also mention the powertop utility

37 Saad June 27, 2009 at 11:54 pm

This blog is more impressive and more useful than ever. I need more help regarding proper installation document on “php-network weathermap” on Cacti as plugins

38 Jack June 28, 2009 at 2:18 am

No love for whowatch ? Real time info on who’s logged in, how their connected (SSH, TTY, etc) and what process thay have running.

http://www.pttk.ae.krakow.pl/~mike/#whowatch

39 StygianAgenda February 28, 2011 at 9:50 pm

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 19/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft I just became an instant fan of ‘whowatch’. Thanks!!! ;)

40 Ponzu June 28, 2009 at 2:28 am

vi — tool used to examine and modify almost any configuration file.

41 Manoj April 27, 2011 at 9:28 am

It is not a tool. It is an Editor

42 su - July 28, 2011 at 9:30 pm

An editor is a tool for text documents.

43 Eric schulman June 28, 2009 at 5:38 am

dtrace is a notable mention for the picky hackers that wish to know more about the behavior of the operating system and it’s programs internals.

44 Ashok kumar June 28, 2009 at 5:48 am

hi gud information , keep it up

ash

45 Enzo June 28, 2009 at 6:09 am

You missed: iftop & nethogs

46 Adrian Fita June 28, 2009 at 7:09 am

Excellent list. Like Amr El-Sharnoby above, I also find atop indispensable and think it must be installed on every system.

In addition I would like to add iotop to monitor disk usage per process and jnettop to very easily monitor bandwidth allocation between connections on a Linux system.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 20/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 47 Knightsream June 28, 2009 at 8:53 am

Well, the one i use right now is Pandora FMS 3.0 and its making my work easy.

48 praveen k June 28, 2009 at 12:56 pm

I would like to add whoami ,who am i, finger, pinky , id commands

49 create own website June 28, 2009 at 3:32 pm

i always love linux, great article

50 Mathieu Desnoyers June 28, 2009 at 9:14 pm

One tool which seems to be missing from this list is LTTng. It is a system-wide tracing tool which helps understanding complex performance problems in multithreaded, multiprocess applications involving many userspace-kernel interactions.

The project is available at http://www.lttng.org. Recent SuSE distributions, WindRiver, Monta Vista and STLinux offer the tracer as distribution packages. The standard way to use it is to install a patched kernel though. It comes with a trace analyzer, LTTV, which provides nice view of the overall system behavior.

Mathieu

51 Andy Leo June 29, 2009 at 1:02 am

Very useful, well done. Thanks!

52 Aveek Sen June 29, 2009 at 1:29 am

Very informative.

53 The Hulk June 29, 2009 at 2:11 am

I love this website.

54 kburger June 29, 2009 at 3:08 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 21/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft If we’re talking about a web server, apachetop is a nice tool to see Apache’s activity.

55 Ram June 29, 2009 at 4:07 am

Dude you forgot the most important of ALL!

net-snmpd

With it you can collect vast amounts of information. Then with snmpwalk and scripts you can create your own web NMS to collect simple information like ping, disk space, services down.

56 Kartik Mistry June 29, 2009 at 5:15 am

`iotop` is nice one to be include in list. I used `vnstat` very much for keeping track of my download when I was on limited connection :)

57 nixCraft June 29, 2009 at 7:03 am

@Everyone

Thanks for sharing all your tools with us.

58 feilong June 29, 2009 at 10:01 am

Very useful, thinks for sharing.

Take a look to a great tools called nmon. I use it on AIX IBM system but works now on all GNU/linux system now.

59 boz June 29, 2009 at 10:21 am

mtr

60 Scyldinga June 29, 2009 at 10:21 am

I’m with @paul tergeist, tools every linux user should know. The ps samples are nice, thanks.

No reference to configuration management tools ?

cfengine/puppet/chef?

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61 Ken McDonell June 29, 2009 at 9:19 pm

Nice summary article.

If your “system” is large and/or distributed, and the performance issues you’re tackling are complex, you may wish to explore Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). It unifies all of the performance data from the tools you’ve mentioned (and more), can be extended to include new applications and service layers, works across the network and for clusters and provides both real-time and retrospective analysis.

See http://www.oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp

PCP is included in the Debian-based and SUSE distributions and is likely to appear in the RH distributions in the future.

As a bonus, PCP also works for monitoring non-Linux platforms (Windows and some of the Unix derivatives).

62 Lance June 30, 2009 at 2:37 am

I love your collection.

I use about 25% of those regularly, and another 25% semi-regularly. I’ll have to add another 25% of those to my list of regulars.

Thanks for compiling this list.

63 bogo June 30, 2009 at 6:01 am

Very nice collection of linux applications. I work with linux but I can’t say that i know them all.

64 MEHTA GHANSHYAM June 30, 2009 at 9:28 am

REALLY ITS VERY GOOD N USEFULL FOR ALL ADMIN. THANKS ONCE AGAIN

65 fasil June 30, 2009 at 12:06 pm

Good post…already bookmarked… cheers

66 Aleksey Tsalolikhin June 30, 2009 at 7:30 pm http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 23/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft I’ll just mention “ngrep” – network grep.

Great list, thanks!!

Aleksey

67 Abdul Kayyum July 1, 2009 at 3:40 pm

Thanks for sharing this information..

68 Aurelio July 1, 2009 at 8:20 pm

feilong, I agree. I use nmon on my linux boxes from years. It’s worth a look.

69 komradebob July 1, 2009 at 10:36 pm

Great article, many great suggestions.

Was surprised not to see these among the suggestions:

bmon – graphs/tracks network activity/bandwidth real time. etherape – great visual indicator of what traffic is going where on the network wireshark – tcpdump on steroids. multitail – tail multiple files in a single terminal window swatch – track your log files and fire off alerts

70 pradeep July 2, 2009 at 11:14 am

how the hell i missed this site this many days… :P thank god i found it… :) i love it…

71 Jay July 4, 2009 at 5:23 pm

O personally much prefer htop to top. Displays everything very nicely.

phpsysinfo is another nice light web-based monitoring tool. Very easy to setup and use.

72 Manuel Fraga July 5, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Osmius: The Open Source Monitoring Tool is C++ and Java. Monitor “everything” connected to a network with incredible performance. Create and integrate Business Services, SLAs and ITIL processes such as availability management and capacity planning. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 24/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

73 aR July 6, 2009 at 4:17 pm

thanks for sharing all the helpful tools.

74 Shailesh Mishra July 7, 2009 at 7:13 pm

Nice compilation. As usual, always very useful.

It would be nice if some of you knowledgeable guys can shed some light on java heap monitoring thing, thread lock detection and analysis, heap analysis etc.

75 Bjarne Rasmussen July 7, 2009 at 8:00 pm

nmon is a nice tool… try google for it, it rocks

76 Balaji July 12, 2009 at 5:50 pm

Very much Useful Information’s, trafmon is one more useful tool

77 Stefan July 15, 2009 at 8:18 pm

And for those which like lightweight and concise graphical metering: xosview +disk -ints -bat

78 Raja July 19, 2009 at 3:03 am

Awesome. Especially love the ps tips. Very interesting

79 Rajat July 24, 2009 at 4:04 am

Thanks very good info!!!

80 nima0102 July 27, 2009 at 7:39 am

It’s really nice :)

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81 David Thomas August 12, 2009 at 9:49 am

Excellent list!

82 Vinidog August 29, 2009 at 4:53 am

Nice… very nice guy!!!! ;-)

83 Bob Marcan September 4, 2009 at 11:00 am

From the guy who wrote the collect utility for Tru64:

Name : collectl Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 3.3.5 Vendor: Fedora Project Release : 1.fc10 Build Date: Fri Aug 21 13:22:42 2009 Install Date: Tue Sep 1 18:10:34 2009 Build Host: x86-5.fedora.phx.redhat.com Group : Applications/System Source RPM: collectl-3.3.5-1.fc10.src.rpm Size : 1138212 License: GPLv2+ or Artistic Signature : DSA/SHA1, Mon Aug 31 14:42:40 2009, Key ID bf226fcc4ebfc273 Packager : Fedora Project URL : http://collectl.sourceforge.net Summary : A utility to collect various linux performance data Description : A utility to collect linux performance data

Best regards, Bob

84 Tman September 5, 2009 at 8:48 pm

For professional network monitoring use Zenoss: Zenoss Core (open source): http://www.zenoss.com/product/network-monitoring

85 Somnath Pal September 14, 2009 at 9:02 am

Hi,

Thanks for the nice collection with useful samples. Consider adding tools to monitor SAN storage, multipath etc. also.

Best Regards, Somnath

Reply http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 26/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 86 Eddy September 17, 2009 at 8:41 am

I did not see ifconfig or iwconfig on the list

87 Kestev September 17, 2009 at 1:57 pm

openNMS

88 Sergiy September 25, 2009 at 12:39 pm

Thanks for the article. I am not admin myself, but tools are very useful for me too.

Thanks for the comments also :)

89 Mark Seger September 28, 2009 at 6:02 pm

When I wrote collectl my goal was to replace as many utilities as possible for several reasons including: – not all write to log files – different output formats make correlation VERY difficult – sar is close but still too many things it doesn’t collect – I wanted option to generate data that can be easily plotted or loaded into spreadsheet – I wanted sub-second monitoring – I want an API and I want to be able to send data over sockets to other tools – and a whole lot more

I think I succeeded on many fronts, in particular not having to worry if the right data is being collected. Just install rpm and type “/etc/init.d/collectl start” and you’re collecting everything such as slabs and processes every 60 seconds and everything else every 10 seconds AND using <0.1% of the CPU to do so. I personally believe if you're collecting performance counters at a minute or coarser you're not really seeing what your system is doing.

As for the API, I worked with some folks at PNNL to monitor their 2300 node cluster, pass the data to ganglia and from there they pass it to their own real-time plotting tool that can display counters for the entire cluster in 3D. They also collectl counters from individual CPUs and pass that data to collectl as well.

I put together a very simple mapping of 'standard' utilities like sar to the equivilent collectl commands just to get a feel for how they compare. But also keep in mind there are a lot of things collectl does for which there is no equivalent system command, such as Infiniband or Lustre monitoring. How about buddyinfo? And more…

http://collectl.sourceforge.net/Matrix.html

-mark

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90 PeteG September 29, 2009 at 5:33 am

Darn, I’ve been using Linux since Windows 98 was the current MicroSnot FOPA. I know all this stuff. I do not make typoous. Why do you post this stuff? We all know it. Sure we do! But do we remember it? I just read through it and found stuff that I used long ago and it was like I just learned it. I found stuff I didn’t know either. Hummmm…… Imagine that! Thanks, particularly for the PDF. Saved me making one. Hey, where’s the HTML to PDF howto?

Thanks again.

91 Denilson October 26, 2009 at 11:55 pm

Use: free -m To show memory usage in megabytes, which is much more useful.

92 AndrewW November 5, 2009 at 11:48 pm

Is it possible to display hard drive temps from hddtemp in KSysGuard? They are available in Ksensors and GKrellM, without any configuration required. However I prefer the interface and flexibility of KSysGuard. Is there a way of configuring it?

Andrew

93 Abhijit November 10, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Zabbix open source monitoring tool

http://www.zabbix.com

94 greg January 6, 2012 at 6:27 pm

Zabbix is a great tool that it doesn’t require a entirely separate project to make it easy to install and use (like Nagios and FAN).

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 28/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft I’ve been following it since its early days and its come a long way. Its sad that lists like this never give it its due, not even a foot note mention.

while on that note.. really? your 17-20 makes the list, but nmap, mtr, and lsof get relegated to foot notes?

95 Kevin November 15, 2009 at 10:55 pm

Thanks, good work

96 Stefano November 22, 2009 at 4:09 pm

Just thanks! :)

97 GBonev November 25, 2009 at 2:13 pm

Good Job on assembling the list If I may suggest trafshow as an alternative to iptraf when you need to see more detailed info on source/destination , proto and ports at once.

98 Gokul December 7, 2009 at 4:43 am

How to install the Kickstart method in linux

99 Bilal Ahmad December 8, 2009 at 4:01 pm

Very nice collection.. Worth a bookmark…Bravo…

100 Jalal Hajigholamali December 9, 2009 at 5:07 am

Thanks a lot…

101 mancai December 11, 2009 at 6:40 pm

nice sharing, this is what i want looking for few day ago… tq

102 aruinanjan December 14, 2009 at 7:41 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 29/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft This is a nice document for new user, thaks to owner of this document.

arun

103 myghty December 16, 2009 at 7:57 am

Great post!! Thanks.

104 Rakib Hasan December 16, 2009 at 2:09 pm

Very helpful. Thanks a lot!

105 PRR December 22, 2009 at 9:25 pm

After so many thanks. Add one more……..

thank you. It’s very handy.

106 Yusuf December 25, 2009 at 7:35 pm

Mark,

I am in technology myself and this tutorial page is very well organized Thanks for taking the time to create this awesome page great help for Linux new bees like myself.

107 Yusuf December 25, 2009 at 7:40 pm

I meant to thank Vivek Gita once again awesome job

108 Shrik December 31, 2009 at 9:58 am

Thank you very much VERY GOOD WEBSITE

109 sekar January 1, 2010 at 4:16 pm

it is cool

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110 Giriraaj January 5, 2010 at 7:38 am

Thanks for sharing most resourceful information.

111 Bhagyesh Dhamecha January 6, 2010 at 11:58 am

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..

112 Ganesan AS January 10, 2010 at 1:53 pm

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

113 Mark Seger January 10, 2010 at 2:38 pm

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

114 miles January 12, 2010 at 4:58 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 31/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Amr El-Sharnoby: atop is awesome, thanks for the tip.

115 Serg January 12, 2010 at 6:09 am

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. )

116 met00 January 12, 2010 at 6:15 pm

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).

117 Mark Seger January 12, 2010 at 6:36 pm

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

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118 mtituh Alu January 19, 2010 at 2:09 pm

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.

119 nixCraft January 19, 2010 at 3:01 pm

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.

120 kirankumarl February 3, 2010 at 9:26 am

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

121 Visigoth February 21, 2010 at 3:11 pm

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

122 JK February 23, 2010 at 12:43 pm

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..

123 AD February 25, 2010 at 6:23 am

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

124 Tarek February 26, 2010 at 7:18 pm

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).

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 33/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 125 deepu March 2, 2010 at 7:31 am

it is a very good and resourceful infomation.

126 Solo March 7, 2010 at 11:40 pm

OMG !

Amazing – Super – Ultra nice info . THX pinguins !

127 vijay March 12, 2010 at 7:30 am

its so usefulllll thanks a lot

128 Venu Yadav March 23, 2010 at 5:05 am

Good information. Thanks

129 Prashant Redkar March 25, 2010 at 7:10 am

Thank you it is very helpful

130 Saorabh Kumar March 25, 2010 at 12:12 pm

Good knowledge base, great post

131 Spyros March 30, 2010 at 2:52 am

Very interesting read that really includes the tools that every admin should know about.

132 amitabh mishra March 30, 2010 at 9:47 am

Hi Its a great topic. Actually i am a Mysql DBA and i fond a lot of new things here. So i can say it will help in future.

Thanks once again

Reply http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 34/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 133 Chinmaya April 2, 2010 at 4:48 am

Excellent one !!!

134 saurav April 3, 2010 at 6:43 pm

wow this is some great info,also the various inputs in comments. One i would like to add is

ulimit

User limits – limit the use of system-wide resources.

Syntax ulimit [-acdfHlmnpsStuv] [limit]

Options

-S Change and report the soft limit associated with a resource. -H Change and report the hard limit associated with a resource.

-a All current limits are reported. -c The maximum size of core files created. -d The maximum size of a process’s data segment. -f The maximum size of files created by the shell(default option) -l The maximum size that may be locked into memory. -m The maximum resident set size. -n The maximum number of open file descriptors. -p The pipe buffer size. -s The maximum stack size. -t The maximum amount of cpu time in seconds. -u The maximum number of processes available to a single user. -v The maximum amount of virtual memory available to the process.

ulimit provides control over the resources available to the shell and to processes started by it, on systems that allow such control.

135 Mustafa Ashraf Rahman April 20, 2010 at 1:44 pm

hello Vivek Gite, This is really a very good post and useful for all admin. Thanks, Ashraf

136 arief April 21, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Great tips.. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 35/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Thanks

137 Eduardo Cereto April 25, 2010 at 5:20 am

I think you missed my top 2 monitoring tools:

monit: http://mmonit.com/monit/ mrtg : http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

138 Lava Kafle April 29, 2010 at 9:05 am

Perfect examples : thanks

139 wolfc01 May 2, 2010 at 3:32 pm

See also the “Linux Process Explorer” (in development) meant to be an equivalent the windows process explorer of Mark Russinovich.

See http://sourceforge.net/projects/procexp

140 ohwell May 2, 2010 at 6:33 pm

if an “admin” doesnt know 90% of those tools, he isn’t a real admin. you will find most of these tools explained in any basic linux howto…

141 ravi May 3, 2010 at 1:05 pm

how the systems can be seen from sitting on one computer like as admin. what is going on screen in grd floor computers?

142 Anonymous May 7, 2010 at 7:17 pm

but how to kill process ID in my server..

143 FHJ May 11, 2010 at 2:32 pm

I assume you can find the process ID – for example if your process is called foo.bar, you could do ps -ef | grep foo.bar http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 36/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft this will give the PID (process ID) as well as other information. Then do kill -9 PID (where PID is the number your found in the above).

If you are working on a Mac you have to do ‘sudo kill -9 PID’ since the kill command is an “admin” action that it wants you to be sure about.

Or if you use top, and you can see the process you want to kill in your list, you can just type k and you will be prompted for the PID (the screen will freeze so it’s easy to read). You type the number and “enter”, will have to confirm (y), and the process is killed with -15. Which is less “severe” than a “kill -9″ which really kills just about any process (without allowing it a graceful exit of any kind).

Use with care!

144 someone May 10, 2010 at 5:59 pm

Gnome system monitor is a pretty useless utility if you ask me. its neat to have it as an applet, but thats it.

145 kalyan de May 14, 2010 at 2:18 am

Thanks,

I think it will be very helpfull for me as i am practicng oracle in redhat linux4. Today i will try to check it. I want 1 more help. I am not clear about crontab. saupposed i want to start a crontab in my system with any script which i have kept in /home/oracle and want to execute in every 1 hour. Can u send me how i can do with details. Thanks,

kalyan de. Chennai, india +91 9962300520

146 Samuel Egwoyi May 14, 2010 at 9:29 am

how can i practice Mysql using linux

147 Basil May 21, 2010 at 8:49 pm

This article simply rocks

148 Fenster June 1, 2010 at 10:24 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 37/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft hey, thanks, just installed htop and iptraf, very nice tools!!

149 zim June 2, 2010 at 1:12 pm

atop

man atop shows

“The program atop is an interactive monitor to view the load on a Linux system. It shows the occupation of the most critical hardware resources (from a performance point of view) on system level, i.e. cpu, memory, disk and network.It also shows which processes are responsible for the indicated load with respect to cpu- and memory load on process level; disk- and network load is only shown per process if a kernel patch has been installed.”

150 Boggles September 21, 2011 at 1:52 am

Have to agree with zim. Atop is a great tool along with it’s report generating sister application atopsar. This is a must-have on any server I manage.

151 Amit June 2, 2010 at 1:26 pm

Hello,

How to install a Suphp on cpanel.

152 Walker June 4, 2010 at 4:19 am

Thanks :) THIS helped me a lot.

153 m6mb3rtx June 4, 2010 at 4:34 pm

Great article, very userfull tools!

154 dudhead June 5, 2010 at 2:38 pm

Great list! Missed df command in the list.

155 giftzy June 5, 2010 at 6:26 pm http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 38/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft I become to love linux after 10 years of hp-ux

156 Rafael Quirino de Castro June 7, 2010 at 5:08 pm

I´m lookuing for apache parameter on the web and found here.

So, my contribute is: try to use iftop, iptraf, ifstat, jnettop and ethstatus for network graphical and CLI monitoring.

Use tcmpdump and ngrep for packet sniffing

HTB is very good for QoS in the network, especially if you need to reduce slower VPN network

157 georges June 9, 2010 at 3:39 pm

fuser command is missing from this list. it tells you which command is using a file at the moment. Since in Linux everything is a file, it is very useful to know! Use it this way: # to know which process listens on tcp port 80: fuser 80/tcp

# to know which process uses the /dev/sdb1 filesystem: fuser -vm /dev/sdb1 etc …

158 Naga June 13, 2010 at 7:19 am

Is there any good tools for analyzing Apache/Tomcat instances.

159 Jan 'luckyduck' Brinkmann June 15, 2010 at 11:02 am

‘ethtool’ can also be very useful, depending on the situation:

– searching for network problems – checking link status of ethernet connections – and so on

160 Abdullah June 16, 2010 at 7:15 am

nice list, at the end i think what you meant is “Bonus” and not “bounce”

“bounce” means “jump”

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 39/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft “bonus” means extra goodies :)

161 dust June 23, 2010 at 8:19 am

What is in Linux that is equal to cfgadm in Solaris?

162 Jerome Christopher July 6, 2010 at 7:55 pm

Thanks for the excellent list of commands, links and info. Jerome.

163 sriharikanth July 12, 2010 at 1:49 pm

Thanks, very useful information provided.

164 Jyoti July 13, 2010 at 9:57 am

very useful

165 t.k. July 16, 2010 at 10:02 pm

Good compilation of commands. Thanks!

166 Thomas August 3, 2010 at 5:40 pm

If you want graphy easly your performance data, try BrainyPDM: an another open source tool! http://www.brainypdm.org

167 Zanil Hyder August 4, 2010 at 5:44 am

Though i have come across most of these names, having them all in one list will prove to be a good resource. I am going to make a list from these and have it within my website which i use for reference.

Thanks for the examples.

168 brownman August 20, 2010 at 8:57 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 40/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft web-based gui : webmin wins them all

169 chandra August 28, 2010 at 7:39 am

Hi ite really very very nice which is helful to fresher.

Thanks a lot…………………..

Regards Amuri Chandra

170 George August 30, 2010 at 3:53 pm

Great resource…Really helpful for a novice as well for an expert…

171 SHREESAI LUG September 4, 2010 at 5:36 am

hiiiiiiiiiiiii we r SHREESAI LINUX USER GROUP FRM MUMBAI THIS COMMANDS R REALLY NICE

THANKS VIVEK SIR PLZ REPLY US ON MAIL

172 Tunitorios September 12, 2010 at 2:31 am

Thanks for this great tips. My question is how to show the username(s) wich are connected to the server and they are using ftp protocole ?

173 Marcelo Cosentino April 7, 2011 at 12:38 pm

Try ftptop . I think you can find it in centos , red hat , slack, debian etc… Ftptop works with a lot of ftp servers daemons.

174 mark seger September 12, 2010 at 11:48 am

I don’t believe that ftp usage by user is recorded anywhere, so you’d have to get inventive. The way I would do it is use collectl to show both processes sorted by I/O and ftp stats. Then is simply becomes a matter of see which processes are contributing to the I/O and who their owners are. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 41/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft -mark

175 jan February 24, 2011 at 7:42 am

Usually ftp access are recorded in /var/log/messages file (at least pure-ftpd)

176 sriram September 12, 2010 at 12:53 pm

Dumpcap is another command which is useful for capturing packets. Very useful tool

177 Riadh Rezig September 12, 2010 at 1:12 pm

There is another tools “Incron” : This program is an “inotify cron” system. It consists of a daemon and a table manipulator. You can use it a similar way as the regular cron. The difference is that the inotify cron handles filesystem events rather than time periods.

178 eaman September 14, 2010 at 6:03 am

discus is a nice / light tool to have an idea of file system usage.

179 Amzath September 14, 2010 at 9:43 pm

Handy list.

Also, these might be handy as well…

lsdev – list of installed devices lsmod – list of installed modules ldd – to see dependencies of a executable file watch – automated refresh of any code every specified seconds, etc stat – details of any file getconf – to get HP server details runlevel – redhat run level

Search in web for more detailed info.

Good luck…

180 Rafiq September 20, 2010 at 11:45 am

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 42/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Hi guys, I m totally new to the linux & this web aswell. Would some1 help me here regarding, mirrordir utility? what would b the full syntex if i only want to copy/mirror changed/edited files from source to destination. since last mirror. And how to define specific time to run this command, i mean schedule. Thanks in advance.

181 Jalal Hajigholamali September 20, 2010 at 11:54 am

Hi,

use “rsync” command..

182 leebert September 28, 2010 at 8:58 pm

Don’t forget systemtap (stap) which provides the equivalent of Solaris’ invaluable “dtrace” scripting utility. There’s a “dtrace” for Linux project but I haven’t been able to get it to compile on my OpenSuSE 11.x.

On SuSE Linux is “getdelays” , enabled via the grub kernel command line “delayacct” switch (starting with SuSE 10 Enterprise…). It’ll reveal the amount of wait a given process spends waiting for CPU, disk (I/O) or memory (swap), great for isolating lag in the system.

There are many many other monitoring tools (don’t know if these were mentioned before) atopsar (atop-related), the sysstat/sar-related sa* series (sadc, sadf, sa1), isag, saidar, blktrace (blktrace- blkiomon / blktrace-blkparse), iotop, ftop, htop, nigel’s monitor (nmon), famd/fileschanged, acctail, sysctl, dstat, iftop, btrace, ftop, iostat, iptraf, jnettop, collectl, nagios, the RRD-related tools, the sys-fs tools, big sister/brother … you could fill a book with them all.

183 Lonu Feruz September 29, 2010 at 8:37 am

please help where I can insert the command of route add of a node. whenever the server is up i have to re do the command. I need to know where i can put this command permanently

184 nagaraju October 1, 2010 at 4:47 am

IT IS SUPERB LIST

185 MAHENDRA SINGH October 2, 2010 at 12:09 pm

thanx http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 43/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft your collection is fantastic.

now i want to know that, how linux works

186 Rino Rondan October 7, 2010 at 7:37 pm

Thanx !!!

A really completed guide !

187 games October 8, 2010 at 1:43 am

thank you so much it’s very usefull for me

188 sameer October 15, 2010 at 6:14 am

ThanX..!!

can u send basic linux commands with ex Thanks again

189 Gunjan October 17, 2010 at 3:42 pm

Nice post, its really useful and helping beginners to resolve server issue

190 Moe October 19, 2010 at 9:13 am

another good tool for monitoring traffic and network usage: vnstat this also makes statistics for bandwidth usage over time which can be display for daily, weekly and monthly usage. very useful if you don’t want to install a web-based tool for this.

191 Stan April 21, 2011 at 12:35 pm

Nice history stats.

192 vishal sapkal October 19, 2010 at 2:54 pm

very nice http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 44/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft very importan tool of monetering thanks for ……………………………………….

193 david a. lawson October 22, 2010 at 12:32 am

this rocks. it could not have come at a better time as i am into my first networking course. thanks so much… i found this through stumbleupon linux/unix

194 ram November 12, 2010 at 8:55 am

well,there are so good,i love them!

195 Nik November 15, 2010 at 5:01 pm

If you want to monitor CPU, memory, I/O and disk usage across multiple servers you can use Librato Silverline – it’s a commercial product but the first 8 cores are always free. You can actually do a lot more with Silverline, i.e. place apps in individual containers, assign resource quotas to containers, trigger events etc. but as a monitoring tool it is really great too.

196 Rajkapoor M November 30, 2010 at 12:52 pm

Hi, It’s awasome……………………..thanks to builder….. Thanks&Regards, Rajkapoor M

197 jalexandre December 2, 2010 at 12:41 am

Perl?!

198 jalexandre December 2, 2010 at 12:44 am

And a good Sysadmin always can count with you prefered script language.

I using perl for monitoring a lot of basic infra structure services, like DHCP, DNS, Ldap, and Zabbix for generate alarms and very nice graphs.

199 Sarath Babu M December 11, 2010 at 9:07 am

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 45/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Hi,

One of My Professor is introduce about the Ubantu This os is I like very much this flyover. Before I am Using XP but now I download all app. and I all applications. i always love linux, great article.

sarath

200 Laxman December 23, 2010 at 9:37 am

Very interesting I will try I hope it’ll help for me

201 sah December 23, 2010 at 10:19 pm

thanks alot … its a great help~!

202 KK December 25, 2010 at 4:19 am

Sumo is the best, the best that ever was and the best that ever will be.

Way to go Sumo

203 Deepak January 6, 2011 at 1:18 pm

Thanks …. This is really helpful….

204 mark January 7, 2011 at 7:05 am

How would I get a list of slow running websites on my server via ssh?

205 nigratruo January 13, 2011 at 6:41 pm

Great list, but why is TOP still used?

It is a highly limited utility. HTOP can do all top can, plus a ton of stuff more: 1. use colors for better readabilty. In the 21st century, all computers have a super hightech thing on their monitor called COLORS (sarcasm off) 2. allow process termination and sending of signals (even multi select several processes) 3. show cpu / ram usage with visual bars instead of numbers 4. show ALL processes: top cannot do that, it just shows what is on the screen. It is the main limiting factor that made me chuck it to the curb. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 46/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 5. Use your cursor keys to explore what cannot be shown on the screen, for example full CLI parameters from commands. 6. Active development. There are new features. Top is dead and there does not seem to have been any active development for 10 years (and that is how the tool looks)

206 coldslushy February 7, 2011 at 12:55 pm

Colors? Too resource intensive…

207 josh July 19, 2011 at 3:38 pm

Colors do not always contrast well with the background.

208 abdul hameed February 2, 2011 at 6:52 am

Dear All,

My Oracle Enterprice Linux getting very slow, when my local R12.1 start.

by using “top” command i found lot of Database users are running. normally in other R12 instance only few Database users are available. can any one tell me what might be the problem,, is it OS level issue or my Application Issue.. where i have to start the tuning .

Kinldy advice me.

Thanks in Advance, Abdul Hameed

209 Vimal February 9, 2011 at 8:02 pm

Shit, this looks great! Thanks very much.

210 Michael February 10, 2011 at 10:30 am

“My Oracle Enterprice Linux getting very slow, when my local R12.1 start.”

Arghh! Linux is turning into Windows!

These are super machines, people! Remember when 4.2BSD came out, and people were saying “Unix is becoming VMS”? With 4.1 BSD, we had been flying on one MIP machines (think of a one Mhz clock rate – three orders of magnitude slower than today’s machines, not Ghz… Mhz!). So much was added so quickly into 4.2 (kernels were no longer a few hundred kilobytes at most) http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 47/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft that performance took a nose dive. But then 4.3 BSD fixed things for a while (with lots of optimizations such as unrolling the the instructions in a bcopy loop till they just just filled an instruction cache line). It didn’t hurt either that memory was getting cheaper, and we could afford to upgrade our 30 user timesharing systems from four Megabytes to eight Megabytes, or even more! It takes an awful amount of software bloat (and blind ignorance of the principles we all learned in our “combinatorial algorithms” classes) to be able to make machines that are over a thousand times faster than the Vaxen we cut our teeth on be “slow”.

Today’s Linux systems hardly feel much faster on multicore x86 machines than they did on personal MicroVaxes or the somewhat faster Motorola 68020 based workstations (except for compilations, which now really scream by – compiling a quarter meg kernel used to take hours, whereas now it feels like barely seconds pass when compiling kernels that, even compressed, are many times larger. But then, compiler writers for the most part (25 years ago, Green Hills employees seemed a glaring exception and I don’t know about Microsoft) have to prove they have learned good programming practices before their skills are considered acceptable). Other software, like the X server, still feels about the same as it did in the eighties, despite today’s machines being so much faster. And forget about Windows!

211 benjamin ngobi February 15, 2011 at 3:44 pm

wow these are great tools one should know.thank you so much coz it just makes me better every day

212 Mousin February 16, 2011 at 9:52 am

Awesome Thanks a ton worth a bookmark..

213 krishna February 23, 2011 at 9:17 am

Friends I have typed the corrected question here below. Please let me know if you can help:

Part1 : Find out the system resources — CPU Usage, Memory Usage, & How many process are running currently in “exact numbers”?, what are the process? Part2: Assume a process CACHE is running on the same system — How many files are opened by CACHE out of the total numbers found above?? what are the files used by CACHE? Whats the virtual memory used by the process. What is the current run level of the process. Part3: How many users or terminals are accessing the process CACHE? Part4: The script should run every 15secs with the time of execution & date of script and the output should be given to a file “richprocess” in the same order as that of the question. Note: NO EXTERNAL TOOLS are allowed to be used with linux. Only shell script should be written for the same!

214 krishna March 4, 2011 at 1:08 pm

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 48/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft I got the answer for it i used $vi file1 #!/bin/bash while [ true ] do echo “—$(date)—-” >> richprocess echo ” 1. virtual mem of the system” >> richprocess vmstat >> richprocess echo ” 2. Free mem available in system” >> richprocess free -m >> richprocess echo ” 3. Mem used by cache & to print files used by CACHE” pmap -x `ps -A | pgrep CACHE` >> richprocess sleep 15 done :wq! $bash file1 & $cat richprocess # to see the output..

I had a worse comment from someone to try a nonexistent website.. saying “www.Iwantothersdomyhomework.com” please dont post things like this. I am asking help only because I want to learn. Thanks for support from this site..

215 vasu April 16, 2011 at 2:07 am

1) lshw

3) w user

216 Ryan Barrett March 1, 2011 at 2:59 pm

Thanks great post!

217 ysha March 4, 2011 at 5:06 am

thanks.. i love it

218 Rohit Shrivastava March 10, 2011 at 5:01 am

Very good for beginners as well as professional. Thank you very much Sir for sharing your knowledge. I really appreciate.

219 ctian March 11, 2011 at 8:41 am http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 49/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft nice one. it really works for a newby like me

220 Michael March 17, 2011 at 7:01 am

This is really helpful. I know these tools, but did not use them well. Many thanks for your tips.

221 PRADEEP March 28, 2011 at 4:33 am

I ve updated kernel…now i need to update it without restart the server.

Plz help….

222 John April 5, 2011 at 9:29 pm

cant see nload on the list , easy showing of whats going on with your network..

nload eth0 should show rest.

223 Parthyz April 12, 2011 at 6:30 am

Great Work man.. thanks a lot..

224 Matias April 12, 2011 at 12:46 pm

Nice list. I would add LogWatch, to send daily reports to your mail.

225 sasidaran April 15, 2011 at 5:16 am

Good collection of commands.

226 TiTiMan April 15, 2011 at 3:29 pm

Thanks for sharing a good list of useful commands.

I found a typo where there should not be a dash in front of the options for

ps auxf

in the command for Find Out The Top 10 Memory Consuming Process http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 50/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft and Find Out top 10 CPU Consuming Process

227 vasu April 16, 2011 at 2:07 am

top

228 Me June 7, 2013 at 4:33 pm

Thanks for the typo correction; command works for me now.

229 Sachin Jain April 18, 2011 at 2:16 pm

Thanks for sharing such a use full commands, friends i want to watch terminal session, which is logged in vai ssh could you please help me??

230 chandu May 6, 2011 at 3:06 am

Plz help me how write the firewall rules in linux.

231 Jalal Hajigholamali May 6, 2011 at 12:40 pm

Hi,

see manual page of iptables and get examples from google

232 cypherb0g May 6, 2011 at 7:56 pm

useful stuff!

233 sudipta June 3, 2011 at 4:58 am

GR8 effort … Worth 2 b appreciated

234 Liunx June 10, 2011 at 7:56 am

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 51/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft That’s great! thanks very much.

235 foster June 16, 2011 at 11:13 pm

Nagios fork Icinga should be on people’s radar as well. https://www.icinga.org/

236 Jalaluddin June 24, 2011 at 6:55 am

Hi I want to learn linux firewall and file server from base. Can u sujjest me, in which link i can get all those useful material.

Thank You

237 Adil Husain June 30, 2011 at 10:43 am

Nice list … i’ll bookmark it for quick ref.

238 Bhanu Kashyap July 9, 2011 at 5:26 pm

Its Very Useful For Us…. Thanks….!!

239 Raivis July 12, 2011 at 5:48 am

systemgraph – http://www.decagon.de/sw/systemgraph/

Nice graphical system statistics RRDTool frontend which produces hourly, daily, weekly, monthly … graphs of various system data. At the moment it provides graphs for memory usage, cpu info, cpu frequency, disk iostat, number of users, number of processes, number of open files, number of tcp connections, system load, network traffic, protocl statistic, harddisk/partition usage and temperatures, privoxy proxy statistic, ntpdrift, fan status and system temperatures. It is simple and it doesn’t require snmp. It consists only of some shell and perl scripts.

240 Aviv.A July 14, 2011 at 10:30 pm

You forgot the command “htop” :D

Reply http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 52/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 241 Laurens July 15, 2011 at 10:16 pm

An other interesting program wich hasn’t been mentioned yet is Midnight Commander (mc). At least it’s my favourite file manager in a console environment.

Thanks all for your contributions. There are a lot of interesting programs wich I already use, or certainly will be using in the future.

242 Sravi Raj July 19, 2011 at 5:03 am

Nice List

243 andy July 21, 2011 at 8:48 am

NO PRINT FUNKTION ? BIG FAIL IN YOUR FACE…damn why is every hole blogging but a printfunktion is missing ? i dont need the scrappie comments in my prints…..

244 Tommie September 11, 2011 at 8:27 am

Nice Roundup. However, I love you not having a print function. I am able to print what I need without it… ;)

htop missing? :)

245 nixCraft September 11, 2011 at 12:21 pm

To see a print version just append /print to the end of the url.

246 GEORGE FAREED July 25, 2011 at 8:43 pm

thaaaaaaaaaaaanks alot :) its useful informations :)

247 apparao August 3, 2011 at 11:36 am

Thanks

248 kiran.somidi August 3, 2011 at 12:47 pm

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 53/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft traceroute

249 kiran.somidi August 3, 2011 at 12:49 pm

tarceroute coomand is not their

250 Lalit Sharma August 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm

how can i copy all this?

251 amit lamba August 29, 2011 at 8:16 am

m using ubuntu 9.10 on system but problem is regarding internet …. unable to connect with internet… waiting for useful reply

252 Daniel Brasil August 30, 2011 at 10:03 pm

Very good post. I’ve some problems trying to figure out historical data about disk usage. I still dont know a good tool for that. sar is wonderful but it’s unable to record disk usage per process. You know any tool for that?

253 greg January 6, 2012 at 6:30 pm

most monitoring tools like nagios, cacti, and zabbix give you the ability to trend your disk usage, and even alert at certain capacity points.

254 jock September 6, 2011 at 2:45 am

Its great, but i’m having a little inconvenient, i want to look the detail for a process, exactly from apache, but the result is always the seem, any one have a trick for see them? explaining better, i have a process from apache but not die, it keep for a long time using the resource and overloading the machine, when i see with a “ps auxf” the result is apache 32327 85.7 0.5 261164 39036 ? R 22:49 0:49 \_ /usr/sbin/httpd

I want see wath is doing this process “32327” exactly, any idea?

255 greg January 6, 2012 at 7:13 pm

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 54/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft you can try strace as mentioned in the tools and you can also look at the files in /proc/PID/ (so /proc/32327 for you)

256 eeb2 September 7, 2011 at 9:25 pm

Thanks for posting this list. Keep up the good posts!

257 khupcom September 12, 2011 at 8:30 am

I’m using monitorix and vnstat to monitor my servers

258 Gaurav kuamr jha October 2, 2011 at 7:42 am

Great it was bagger description for me. This is article has solved my lot of problems thanks for this gkjha009

259 [email protected] October 8, 2011 at 10:14 am

thanks :)

260 Peter Green October 15, 2011 at 3:29 pm

Great article, there are many great suggestions! I want to contribute with these two:

GoAccess – real-time Apache/nginx log analyzer and viewer, runs in a terminal in *nix systems. CCZE – modular log colorizer

261 cirrus October 21, 2011 at 10:44 am

great post cuz , very informative for recent nix converts “PCLinuxOS#1″

262 David Bothwell November 3, 2011 at 4:27 pm

I have just recently released my first open source project the Remote Linux Monitor, which you can find at here . I modeled it on Gnome’s System Monitor and I would love get your feedback on it. Thanks.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 55/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

263 Ferenc Varga November 4, 2011 at 10:06 pm

for http traffic, i suggest to use justniffer.

264 bishow November 8, 2011 at 2:22 pm

yeah really nice post !!! It’s really help me but how about the centos linux command can anyone tell me about that, all the linux command will be same for the all versions of linux (Is it wright guys) . or please email me if you know some code of contos linux cause i using this lunux.

regards,

265 Unni November 11, 2011 at 1:39 am

Well written , keep up the good work .. …. Thanks, Unni

266 Gmaster December 2, 2011 at 12:30 pm

Great job in compiling all the utils in one nice post. Thank you very much!

267 Denis December 9, 2011 at 10:30 pm

Great stuff, nice to have it all in one place. :-)

268 manna December 12, 2011 at 5:09 am

Am working in small company having around 45 employees,we r using linux server in our office, i need to checkout or monitor the user’s website, which they are accessing in office hours,Please any one suggest me with correct command. Thanks

269 Sibbala Govardhan Raju December 13, 2011 at 10:08 am

Dear Sir,

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 56/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft My Name is Govardhan Raju from TIRUPATI, ANDHRA PRADESH. working as a linux (RHEL4) operator. I want to take data backup daily. Is there any posibility to take todays date files only ? Please suggest me the commands which are useful to take backup daily with syntax.

Thanking U Sir,

S Govardhan Raju

270 Kash January 15, 2012 at 2:41 pm

This is monitoring article not backup article??? Search your question somewhere else.

271 bhaskar February 6, 2012 at 7:57 pm

Hi, I’m using windows 7 version. how to access the UNIX commands in windows plat form without installing any set up file or UNIX Operating System.

Could you please suggest any to me.

Thanks,

272 Steve February 13, 2012 at 4:11 pm

I feel an important one is psacct.. Should have at least made the list. Very useful to track what commands/users are eating cpu time.

273 AL February 24, 2012 at 12:55 pm

There is another tool we use for system monitoring, it’s from IBM called NMON – pretty good tool, I recommend it.

274 sudhir menon March 21, 2012 at 7:10 am

nfsiostat is a great small command on linux

275 nishhhh March 22, 2012 at 2:15 pm

nice collection..referencing related articles are like ‘feathers in the cap’ !! appreciate it..thanks! http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 57/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

276 naveen March 23, 2012 at 8:54 am

Dear all ,

I have deployed some 40 routers in the cafes,60 more in have to deploy in diff region/areas.I want to monitor the Wifi routers sitting in one place.

I have connected Debian installed thin client to each router to provide internet to the customers @ cafe,free browsing for 30 mins.

Can some one suggest me a tool for monitoring the Routers & my debian machine performance.

Regards Naveen C

277 naveen March 23, 2012 at 8:58 am

The router model is DAP-1155 Wireless N 150 i have purchased some 100 and i am planning to buy 300 more.

pls do help me

Thanks in advance

Naveen C

278 LTJX August 2, 2012 at 3:08 pm

Such routers often include a management/monitoring package, which may be more immediately useful than using Debian-based commands, and the router software may allow for viewing the multiple routers you describe from a single screen. I know that the latest NETGEAR wireless routers include a software package like this.

But, why just 30 minutes per customer? Isn’t that the wrong message to give the cafe customers?: Like, hurry up and drink your coffee/tea, and then get out!! Maybe you could try a one hour limit and see what happens. Linux is much more efficient than many people realize, even under heavy usage.

I think that Starbucks and similar shops in North America tend to offer unlimited Internet access with any purchase – and most don’t really seem to enforce the purchase requirement, unless a “freeloader” is annoying or being offensive to other customers, etc.

279 Stan August 6, 2012 at 6:25 am

Have you tried MRTG to monitor your routers. More for just network http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 58/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

280 Eric April 6, 2012 at 1:18 pm

Great post! Some of these I never thought to use that way. When using free I will often use the -m option to display in Mb. (Example: free -m)

281 sudarshan April 11, 2012 at 6:17 am

Hi Team,

I required to find the hardware information in linux, can you please advise.

I recieved alert as below:

Tivoli MINOR for : Accelerator board battery failed

thanks sudarshan

282 Prasad August 17, 2012 at 6:23 pm

Just do

# uname

for specific details do:

# uname –help

283 Navneet April 21, 2012 at 10:34 am

Thanks Vivek,

For Posting this. It is very useful for Beginners as well.

Keep the Great work going on…..

284 Shreyansh Modi May 2, 2012 at 6:04 pm

Great Share :) After using a few of these commands I am feeling like I am an Linux Operations Engineer ;)

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 59/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

285 Ravi May 9, 2012 at 6:17 pm

Great and useful information. Thanks

286 Michael May 10, 2012 at 10:10 pm

Your forgot monit (I dont care why it failed at 3a.m. – just fix it and tell me!) and collectd (just record how things are going over the months, without freaky sar..)

Michael ;)

287 Omar Osorio June 5, 2012 at 8:27 pm

lshw -short

288 vvvv June 12, 2012 at 3:50 am

I Liked it too thank you)

289 oran00b June 16, 2012 at 7:05 pm

excellent and concise info. For people who are not dedicated Linux Admin but need some tools to work with Linux, this is excellent!

290 darkfader July 3, 2012 at 5:14 pm

Learn to use sar well and you’ll never need to use iostat, vmstat, etc.

291 William G. Loughran July 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm

Excellent – can’t thank you enough. Not sure what CIFS ‘tools’ we were using – not SAMBA

292 Vichuz July 12, 2012 at 2:17 am

Keep up the nice work. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 60/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

293 seema July 17, 2012 at 8:54 am

pl help me as i am new in linux i am copying a folder in /filesystem/usr/local …. form pen derive , but it is giving error msg ” no permission ”

pl help

294 Sandeep July 17, 2012 at 12:19 pm

Its really useful ….nice one..I liked it!!!

295 Praveen Reddy July 19, 2012 at 5:29 am

Hi,

How to take data back in Linux Enterprise 6 daily basis and how to speed up (refresh) in linux. is there any specific commands for this???

help me out of this…

296 Chetan July 25, 2012 at 7:40 am

One of my fav network traffic monitoring tool is iftop

297 Don Saulo August 2, 2012 at 10:54 am

Good job, guys! Thanks for share.

298 netman August 26, 2012 at 3:49 am

thanks for your good articles

299 balwant September 1, 2012 at 5:46 pm

very very nice..

Reply http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 61/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft 300 chinta October 1, 2012 at 3:01 pm

very usefull

301 Carlos A. Junior October 1, 2012 at 4:35 pm

Great post…now i’m think more prepared to find an strange memory usage on apache server ¬¬.

Great post.

302 Anup October 5, 2012 at 11:57 am

Nice job

303 Richard Cain October 11, 2012 at 7:09 am

My new favourite tool is “systemd.analyze”. It is great for pin-pointing bottle-necks in startup. It can produce a very nice plot of every process, allowing you instantly see what’s holding things up.

304 Girijesh October 16, 2012 at 3:54 am

very informative…!!!

Thanks a ton.. :)

305 Shekhar October 22, 2012 at 9:30 am

What is tool to get All activity info. Like any user create/delete/move file or directory information???

306 Rahul November 8, 2012 at 9:26 am

+100

307 Hannes Dorn November 8, 2012 at 10:46 pm

Instead of Cacti I prefer munin. Installation and configuration is easy and on monitored systems, http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 62/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft only a small client is needed.

308 xuedi November 11, 2012 at 5:50 pm

I would replace top with htop, it extents top with a much nicer ncurses and lots of functions …

309 Bill November 14, 2012 at 3:02 pm

Great list, Shekhar For File Activity etc, I use vigil and vlog client to create the logs

310 Vishal November 15, 2012 at 6:26 am

try one for tool to report network interfaces bandwith just like vmstat/iostat

# ifstat

311 Vishnuprasad November 25, 2012 at 3:41 pm

And I am using “watch” utility. This is basically not a system monitoring tool. But in some case we need to watch the out put of a command continuously. That time this is not easy to enter the same command all the time and watch the output. In that case you can use this utility. You can set the interval of each refresh.

Eg: watch -n 10 df -Th (this is just an example) This command will give you the output of df -Th in each 10 seconds. Then you can easily measure the hard disk usage.

Cheers…!

312 Vishnuprasad November 25, 2012 at 3:43 pm

A better Server Management Software…

http://www.webmin.com/

Cheers…!

313 Konstantin November 28, 2012 at 3:02 am

I’d also add ‘monit’ utility, to monitor assorted services and perform actions 9such as restarting the stopped service). http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 63/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

314 jlarchev December 15, 2012 at 7:21 am

Hi all, A nice monitoring tool we’re using for years : http://sysusage.darold.net

315 pechalbata.com January 2, 2013 at 2:52 pm

Great tool! Thanks!

316 Uday Vallamsetty December 31, 2012 at 6:03 pm

All of these are must have tools for doing any analysis/monitoring of activity on Linux boxes. Thanks for collecting everything into a concise space.

317 Lucy January 2, 2013 at 11:11 pm

Thank you for this great post is it very helpful for someone that is starting out.

318 peter January 11, 2013 at 5:04 am

very useful article..im a reader of both nixcraft and cyberciti.. well done

319 veera February 7, 2013 at 7:00 am

Very nice… Thanks for the effort…..

320 sinlir February 8, 2013 at 10:29 am

Very nice!

321 wanie February 12, 2013 at 10:38 am

Hi.. i would know about your opinion…i must do the project about monitoring devices availability… what the software in linux about this and i must editing the coding software.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 64/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

322 Ankit Srivastava February 26, 2013 at 10:01 pm

You guys are awesome.

I love this website :)

323 Mayur April 19, 2013 at 11:14 am

Please can somebody help me to with Autosys/ Control M sheduling tool. I ‘m new to both these tools and never used them. want some tutorials to learn any of these tools for beginners .

also, which unix commands are important for production support guys apart from normal commands like Grep,find,less,more etc. any help in form of documents / tutorials is appreciated…

thanks in advance…

appreciate ur reply on my maild id

324 chandan June 1, 2013 at 6:56 am

It helped me a lot.

Thanks a lot and even more.

325 Shreehari June 4, 2013 at 12:31 pm

Its really awesome!!

326 mohsin June 6, 2013 at 6:46 pm

TQ, Very helpful tips… Just my $0.02; ETHERAPE for linux is a free graphical tool http://etherape.sourceforge.net/ which is really helpful to help monitor network traffic in a network segment. Many instances i managed to pinpoint which PC/server is heavily broadcasting packets that caused network slow-down.. tq

327 nickchacha June 8, 2013 at 11:38 am

This are very helpful tips. Thank you chief. Am a newbie in SysAdmin and i this commands will come in hardy.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 65/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

328 Kristoffer June 14, 2013 at 3:43 pm

Don’t forget cowsay!

329 Thusitha Nuwan July 1, 2013 at 4:28 am

Thanks very much for this list. It was very useful.

330 Lukey July 20, 2013 at 12:55 am

I”m using the Helper MonkeyTool as a portable ssh Java based interface for Unix/Linux system administration and monitirng.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sshadmincontrol/files/

331 jasoncabahug July 22, 2013 at 5:26 am

thankz for this tips it was very useful to me.. get more updates about open source..=)

332 BinaryTides July 28, 2013 at 4:08 am

Thanks, the list is very useful

333 Rajkumar kathane September 26, 2013 at 5:08 am

hi thank u for sharing ur knowledge very useful.

334 erm3nda September 27, 2013 at 11:29 pm

Thx for that usefull info: Even if we use or not some web host managers, know manual usage of some tools is a must have for a sysadmin, or almost for decent ones… What will you do when the host manager dont work? Who have to repair it? Is You and you will need a real knowledge about what’s on your hands :)

So many thanks again.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 66/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Reply

335 vikas October 28, 2013 at 1:28 pm

great help thanks a ton

336 dk November 5, 2013 at 4:25 am

kindly share some usefull linux commands and configuration setup

337 Ramesh December 2, 2013 at 1:31 pm

Excellent Article

338 Piyush Dangodra January 7, 2014 at 3:29 am

Excellent Post – keep up the good work : )

339 maltris January 11, 2014 at 8:46 am

The ps syntax is wrong.

For memory: ps aux |sort -nrk 4 |head -10

For cpu: ps aux |sort -nrk 3 |head -10

340 Mahesh Vakharia March 7, 2014 at 4:16 am

EXCELLENT work , one humble suggestion . when you use top command , or any command , please do mention the way to clear the work load of system so that the system can be speeded up . Regards . Very Informative.

341 tungdt March 22, 2014 at 2:52 pm

Very useful article.thanks

342 Wellington Torrejais da Silva June 24, 2014 at 7:31 pm http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html 67/71 10/29/2014 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft Thanks!!!

343 Dev jha September 22, 2014 at 11:43 am

wow….its cooooool… thank you very much.

344 Vakharia Mahesh September 25, 2014 at 3:34 pm

E X C E L L E N T !!!!! This word is also not sufficient for such a lovely information you are sharing with all of us without any selfish motto. Kudos .

With warm regards

Mahesh Vakharia