Sar (Unix)

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System Activity Report (sar) is a Unix System V-derived system monitor command used to report on various system loads, including CPU activity, memory/paging, interrupts, device load, network and swap space utilization. Sar uses /procfilesystem for gathering information

Video Sar (Unix)

Platform support

Sar was originally developed for Solaris operating system and it is available in Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, but it is not available for MacOS or FreeBSD, until 2013 there was a bsdsar tool actually deprecated .

Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSe provide sar utility through the sysstat package.

Maps Sar (Unix)

Syntax

sar [-flags] [ -e time ] [ -f filename ] [-i sec ] [ -s time ]
-f filename Uses filename as the data source for sar. The default is the current daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd.
-e time Selects data up to time. The default is 18:00.
-i sec Selects data at intervals as close as possible to sec seconds.  

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Example

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Sysstat package

Additional to sar command, Linux sysstat package in Debian, RedHat Enterprise Linux and SuSE provides additional reporting tools:

• sar , Collect, report, or save system activity information.
• sa1 , Collect and store binary data in the system activity daily data file
• sa2 , shell variant of sar, supporting the same flags as sar command which write a daily report in the /var/log/sa directory
• sadf(1) , similar to sar but can write its data in different formats (CSV, XML, etc.). This is useful to load performance data into a database, or import them in a spreadsheet to make graphs.
• iostat (1) reports basic CPU statistics and input/output statistics for devices, partitions and network filesystems.
• mpstat(1) reports individual or combined processor related statistics.
• pidstat(1) reports statistics for Linux tasks (processes) : I/O, CPU, memory, etc.
• nfsiostat(1) reports input/output statistics for network filesystems (NFS).
• cifsiostat(1) reports I/O statistics for CIFS resources.

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See also

• atopsar
• Nmon
• sag - "system activity graph" command
• ksar- BSD licensed Java-based application to create graph of all parameters from the data collected by Unix sar utilities.
• CURT, IBM AIX CPU Usage Reporting Tool

• isag, tcl based command to plot sar/sysstat data

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References

• sar(1) - Solaris 10 User Commands Reference Manual
• Easy system monitoring with SAR (IBM developerWorks)
• System Activity Reporter (Softpanorama)
• Article on sar at Computerhope

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Footnotes

Source of article : Wikipedia