Linux System Monitoring Tools

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Linux Tips, Hacks, Tutorials, And Ideas In Blog Format
20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every

SysAdmin Should Know
by VIVEK GITE on JUNE 27, 2009 last updated AUGUST 5, 2015
in CENTOS, DEBIAN LINUX , HOW TO , LINUX, MONITORING , NETW ORKING ,
REDHAT/FEDORA LINUX , SECURITY, SYS ADMIN
eed 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.
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.
Displays memory information off and on.
A
f
Sorts the display by top consumers of various system resources. Useful for
quick identification of performance-hungry tasks on a system.
Enters an interactive configuration screen for top. Helpful for setting up top
for a specific task.
Enables you to interactively select the ordering within top.
Issues renice command.
Issues kill command.
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
0 0
0 2540988 522188 5130400
32
2 4 1 96 0 0
1 0
0 2540988 522188 5130400
720 1199 665 1 0 99 0 0
0 0
0 2540956 522188 5130400
0 1151 1569 4 1 95 0 0
0 0
0 2540956 522188 5130500
6 1117 439 1 0 99 0 0
0 0
0 2540940 522188 5130512
536 1189 932 1 0 98 0 0
0 0
0 2538444 522188 5130588
0 1187 1417 4 1 96 0 0
0 0
0 2490060 522188 5130640
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
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

# 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
Mem:
used
12302896
-/+ buffers/cache:
Swap:
free
9739664
4061800
1052248
shared
buffers
2563232
cached
523124
5154740
8241096
1052248
=> Related: :
1. Linux Find Out Virtual Memory PAGESIZE
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
3.50
Device:
sda
%nice %system %iowait %steal
0.09
tps
0.51
0.03
Blk_read/s
0.00
%idle
95.86
Blk_wrtn/s
Blk_read
Blk_wrtn
22.04
31.88
512.03
16193351 260102868
sda1
0.00
0.00
0.00
2166
sda2
22.04
31.87
512.03
16189010 260102688
180
sda3
0.00
0.00
0.00
1615
=> 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)

06:45:12 PM
CPU
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
%user
2.02
%nice
06/26/2009
0.00
%system
0.27
%iowait
0.01
=> Related: : How to collect Linux system utilization data into a file
0.00
%steal
97.70
%idle
#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)

06:48:11 PM CPU
%user
%nice
06/26/2009
%sys %iowait
%irq
%soft %steal
%idle
06:48:11 PM all
3.50
0.09
0.34
0.03
0.01
0.17
0.00
95.86
1218.0
06:48:11 PM
3.44
0.08
0.31
0.02
0.00
0.12
0.00
96.04
1000.3
06:48:11 PM
3.10
0.08
0.32
0.09
0.02
0.11
0.00
96.28
34.93
06:48:11 PM
4.16
0.11
0.36
0.02
0.00
0.11
0.00
95.25
0.00
06:48:11 PM
3.77
0.11
0.38
0.03
0.01
0.24
0.00
95.46
44.80
06:48:11 PM
2.96
0.07
0.29
0.04
0.02
0.10
0.00
96.52
25.91
06:48:11 PM
3.26
0.08
0.28
0.03
0.01
0.10
0.00
96.23
14.98
06:48:11 PM
4.00
0.10
0.34
0.01
0.00
0.13
0.00
95.42
3.75
06:48:11 PM
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
0000000000aa8000
76 rw--- 00000000002a8000 008:00002 php-cgi
000000000f678000
1980 rw--- 000000000f678000 000:00000
[ anon ]
[ 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
ffffffffff600000
84 rw--- 00007ffffffea000 000:00000
8192 ----- 0000000000000000 000:00000
mapped: 933712K
writeable/private: 4304K
[ stack ]
[ anon ]
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

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
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

/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
cat
cat
cat
/proc/cpuinfo
/proc/meminfo
/proc/zoneinfo
/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
RRDTools 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.
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 computers 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
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.
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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Download PDF version
Found an error/typo on this page?
About the author: Vivek Gite is a seasoned sysadmin and a trainer for the Linux/Unix &
shell scripting. Follow him on Twitter. OR read more like this:
How do I Find Out Linux CPU Utilization?
How do I find out Linux Resource utilization to detect system bottlenecks?
Linux command to gathers up information about a Linux system
How Much RAM does my Ubuntu / Fedora Linux desktop PC have?
Howto: Linux Kill and Logout Users
FreeBSD Display Information About The System Hardware
Linux find the memory used by a program / process using pmap command
Keeping a Log Of Daily Network Traffic for ADSL or Dedicated Remote Linux
ss: Display Linux TCP / UDP Network and Socket Information
Linux Display Bandwidth Usage on Network Interface By Host
{ 353 comments add one }

VonSkippy
June 27, 2009, 5:10 am
Pretty much common knowledge (or should be) but handy to have listed
all in one place.
REPLY
LINK
Jim (JR)
March 21, 2011, 3:30 am
(quote)
Pretty much common knowledge. . . .
(/quote)
Yea, right!
Ive been around the block two or three times and a number of these are
familiar to me but some of the ways theyre 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 isnt funny! Its 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)
REPLY
Steve
LINK
August 3, 2011, 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?
REPLY
LINK
Mike Williams
August 15, 2011, 10:35 pm
Because a lot of us have to live with faulty memory modules,

Steve.
I do agree with you too.:This knowledge isnt that common outside the
comic book fraternity.
REPLY
farseas
LINK
January 8, 2013, 5:29 pm
If you did a lot of sysadmin you would already know the answer
to that question.
REPLY
robb
LINK
June 27, 2009, 8:29 am
yeap most of them are must-have tools.

good job of collecting them in a post.
REPLY
Chris
LINK
June 27, 2009, 8:37 am
Nice list. For systems with just a few nodes I recommend Munin. Its
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
REPLY
ftaurino
LINK
June 27, 2009, 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!
REPLY
LINK
James
June 27, 2009, 9:23 am
pocess or process. haha, i love typos

REPLY
LINK
Sohrab Khan
March 15, 2011, 9:09 am
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
REPLY
LINK
vasu
March 21, 2011, 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
REPLY
LINK
darkdragn
May 31, 2011, 7:14 am
Most of the time that happens if the fsck operation requires

human interaction, which the boot fsck doesnt have. Just restart it, if
you dont 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. Its 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.
REPLY
LINK
Artur
June 27, 2009, 9:40 am
What about Munin ? Lots easier and lighter than Cacti.

REPLY
LINK
nig belamp
December 7, 2010, 4:21 pm
How can you even compare munin to cactistfu your a tool.

REPLY
LINK
PC4N6
April 20, 2011, 7:53 pm
Uhm, geez, this isnt blogspot. Head over there if you have an
uncontrollable need to flame people above your level of understanding
REPLY
RB-211
LINK
May 13, 2011, 12:57 pm
Wow, that was a bit harsh.

REPLY
LINK
grammer nazi
July 24, 2011, 1:54 pm
it is youre 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
REPLY
Jeff
LINK
August 9, 2011, 6:07 pm
Sarcastic pros, N00bs, flaming, harsh language, grammar

nazis. All we need now is a Hitler comparison and we have the full set.
Whos up for a ban?
Also: before stuff can become common knowledge youll first have to
encounter it at least once. Like here in this nice list. Thanks for
sharing!
REPLY
LINK
David
August 25, 2011, 3:05 pm
A ban? Censorship! You Nazi!

REPLY
Roberto
LINK
September 9, 2011, 6:08 pm
Thats grammar, unless youre talking about the actor who

plays Frasier on Cheers. :P
REPLY
Fireman
LINK
October 17, 2011, 11:39 pm
Let me go ahead and re-write your comment, grammer nazi.

It seems you have quite a few errors.
It is youreyou are a tool. Please, when randomly slamming
someones 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! :)
REPLY
LINK
flame on!
Vivek does a great job, as usual. But, thanks for the

laughs, guys!
REPLY
Raj
LINK
June 27, 2009, 10:13 am
Nice list, worth bookmarking!

REPLY
LINK
kaosmonk
June 27, 2009, 10:53 am
Once again, great article!!

REPLY
LINK
Amr El-Sharnoby
June 27, 2009, 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 dont 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 couldnt otherwise be easily detected and would
need many different tools

REPLY
LINK
nixCraft
June 27, 2009, 1:01 pm
@Chris / James
Thanks for the heads-up!
REPLY
Solaris
LINK
June 27, 2009, 1:26 pm
Great post, also great reference.

REPLY
quba
LINK
June 27, 2009, 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
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
REPLY
LINK
Cristiano
June 27, 2009, 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.
REPLY
Peko
LINK
June 27, 2009, 3:40 pm
Yeah, well why a so good admin (I dig(g) your site) wont you use
spelling checkers?
Typo #2 Web-based __Monitioring__ Tool
REPLY
LINK
paul tergeist
June 27, 2009, 4:17 pm
maybe its 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..
REPLY
LINK
harrywwc
June 27, 2009, 10:56 pm
Hi guys,
good list and some great submitted pointers to other useful tools.
to those carp-ing on about typos give us all a break. youve 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
.h
REPLY
LINK
StygianAgenda
February 28, 2011, 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 thats all that really matters.
REPLY
Lolcatz
LINK
April 7, 2011, 10:54 pm
Typos*
REPLY
LINK
roflcopter
June 24, 2011, 1:57 pm
Typographical error*
REPLY
LINK
Pdraig Brady
June 27, 2009, 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
Id also mention the powertop utility
REPLY
Saad
LINK
June 27, 2009, 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
REPLY
Jack
LINK
June 28, 2009, 2:18 am
No love for whowatch ? Real time info on whos logged in, how their
connected (SSH, TTY, etc) and what process thay have running.
http://www.pttk.ae.krakow.pl/~mike/#whowatch
REPLY
LINK
StygianAgenda
February 28, 2011, 9:50 pm
I just became an instant fan of whowatch. Thanks!!! ;)

REPLY
Ponzu
LINK
June 28, 2009, 2:28 am
vi tool used to examine and modify almost any configuration file.

REPLY
LINK
Manoj
April 27, 2011, 9:28 am
It is not a tool. It is an Editor

REPLY
LINK
su -
July 28, 2011, 9:30 pm
An editor is a tool for text documents.

REPLY
Eric schulman
LINK
June 28, 2009, 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 its programs internals.
REPLY
LINK
Ashok kumar
June 28, 2009, 5:48 am
hi gud information , keep it up

ash
REPLY
Enzo
LINK
June 28, 2009, 6:09 am
You missed: iftop & nethogs

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LINK
Adrian Fita
June 28, 2009, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Knightsream
June 28, 2009, 8:53 am
Well, the one i use right now is Pandora FMS 3.0 and its making my
work easy.
REPLY
LINK
praveen k
June 28, 2009, 12:56 pm
I would like to add

whoami ,who am i, finger, pinky , id commands
REPLY
LINK
create own website
June 28, 2009, 3:32 pm
i always love linux, great article

REPLY
LINK
Mathieu Desnoyers
June 28, 2009, 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 userspacekernel 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
REPLY
LINK
Andy Leo
June 29, 2009, 1:02 am
Very useful, well done. Thanks!
REPLY
LINK
Aveek Sen
June 29, 2009, 1:29 am
Very informative.
REPLY
LINK
The Hulk
June 29, 2009, 2:11 am
I love this website.

REPLY
kburger
LINK
June 29, 2009, 3:08 am
If were talking about a web server, apachetop is a nice tool to see

Apaches activity.
REPLY
LINK
Ram
June 29, 2009, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Kartik Mistry
June 29, 2009, 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 :)
REPLY
nixCraft
LINK
June 29, 2009, 7:03 am
@Everyone
Thanks for sharing all your tools with us.
REPLY
feilong
LINK
June 29, 2009, 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.

REPLY
boz
LINK
June 29, 2009, 10:21 am
mtr
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LINK
Scyldinga
June 29, 2009, 10:21 am
Im with @paul tergeist, tools every linux user should know. The ps
samples are nice, thanks.
No reference to configuration management tools ?
cfengine/puppet/chef?
REPLY
LINK
Ken McDonell
June 29, 2009, 9:19 pm
Nice summary article.

If your system is large and/or distributed, and the performance issues youre
tackling are complex, you may wish to explore Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). It
unifies all of the performance data from the tools youve 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).
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LINK
Lance
June 30, 2009, 2:37 am
I love your collection.

I use about 25% of those regularly, and another 25% semi-regularly. Ill have to
add another 25% of those to my list of regulars.
Thanks for compiling this list.
REPLY
bogo
LINK
June 30, 2009, 6:01 am
Very nice collection of linux applications. I work with linux but I cant say
that i know them all.
REPLY
LINK
MEHTA GHANSHYAM
June 30, 2009, 9:28 am
REALLY ITS VERY GOOD N USEFULL FOR ALL ADMIN.

THANKS ONCE AGAIN
REPLY
LINK
fasil
June 30, 2009, 12:06 pm
Good postalready bookmarked cheers

REPLY
LINK
Aleksey Tsalolikhin
June 30, 2009, 7:30 pm
Ill just mention ngrep network grep.

Great list, thanks!!
Aleksey
REPLY
LINK
Abdul Kayyum
July 1, 2009, 3:40 pm
Thanks for sharing this information..

REPLY
Aurelio
LINK
July 1, 2009, 8:20 pm
feilong, I agree. I use nmon on my linux boxes from years. Its worth a
look.
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LINK
komradebob
July 1, 2009, 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
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LINK
pradeep
July 2, 2009, 11:14 am
how the hell i missed this site this many days :P thank god i found it
:) i love it
REPLY
Jay
LINK
July 4, 2009, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Manuel Fraga
July 5, 2009, 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.
REPLY
aR
LINK
July 6, 2009, 4:17 pm
thanks for sharing all the helpful tools.

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LINK
Shailesh Mishra
July 7, 2009, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Bjarne Rasmussen
July 7, 2009, 8:00 pm
nmon is a nice tool try google for it, it rocks

REPLY
Balaji
LINK
July 12, 2009, 5:50 pm
Very much Useful Informations,

trafmon is one more useful tool
REPLY
LINK
Stefan
July 15, 2009, 8:18 pm
And for those which like lightweight and concise graphical metering:
xosview +disk -ints -bat
REPLY
Raja
LINK
July 19, 2009, 3:03 am
Awesome. Especially love the ps tips. Very interesting

REPLY
Rajat
LINK
July 24, 2009, 4:04 am
Thanks very good info!!!

REPLY
LINK
nima0102
July 27, 2009, 7:39 am
Its really nice :)

REPLY
LINK
David Thomas
August 12, 2009, 9:49 am
Excellent list!
REPLY
Vinidog
LINK
August 29, 2009, 4:53 am
Nice very nice guy!!!! ;-)
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LINK
Bob Marcan
September 4, 2009, 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
REPLY
Tman
LINK
For professional network monitoring use Zenoss:

Zenoss Core (open source): http://www.zenoss.com/product/network-monitoring
REPLY
LINK
Somnath Pal
Hi,
Thanks for the nice collection with useful samples. Consider adding tools to
monitor SAN storage, multipath etc. also.
Best Regards,
Somnath
REPLY
Eddy
LINK
I did not see ifconfig or iwconfig on the list

REPLY
Kestev
LINK
openNMS
REPLY
LINK
Sergiy
September 25, 2009, 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 :)
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LINK
Mark Seger
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 doesnt 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
youre 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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LINK
PeteG
Darn,
Ive 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 didnt know either.
Hummmm Imagine that!
Thanks, particularly for the PDF.
Saved me making one.
Hey, wheres the HTML to PDF howto?
Thanks again.
REPLY
LINK
Denilson
October 26, 2009, 11:55 pm
Use:
free -m
To show memory usage in megabytes, which is much more useful.

REPLY
LINK
AndrewW
November 5, 2009, 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
REPLY
LINK
Abhijit
November 10, 2009, 1:46 pm
Zabbix open source monitoring tool

http://www.zabbix.com
REPLY
LINK
greg
January 6, 2012, 6:27 pm
Zabbix is a great tool that it doesnt require a entirely separate

project to make it easy to install and use (like Nagios and FAN).
Ive 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?
REPLY
Kevin
LINK
November 15, 2009, 10:55 pm
Thanks, good work

REPLY
LINK
Stefano
November 22, 2009, 4:09 pm
Just thanks! :)
REPLY
GBonev
LINK
November 25, 2009, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Gokul
December 7, 2009, 4:43 am
How to install the Kickstart method in linux

REPLY
LINK
Bilal Ahmad
Very nice collection.. Worth a bookmarkBravo

REPLY
LINK
Jalal Hajigholamali
Thanks a lot
REPLY
LINK
December 9, 2009, 5:07 am
mancai
December 11, 2009, 6:40 pm
nice sharing, this is what i want looking for few day ago tq
REPLY
LINK
aruinanjan
December 14, 2009, 7:41 am
This is a nice document for new user, thaks to owner of this document.
arun
REPLY
LINK
myghty
December 16, 2009, 7:57 am
Great post!! Thanks.

REPLY
LINK
Rakib Hasan
December 16, 2009, 2:09 pm
Very helpful. Thanks a lot!

REPLY
PRR
LINK
December 22, 2009, 9:25 pm
After so many thanks. Add one more..

thank you. Its very handy.
REPLY
Yusuf
LINK
December 25, 2009, 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.
REPLY
Yusuf
LINK
December 25, 2009, 7:40 pm
I meant to thank Vivek Gita

once again awesome job
REPLY
Shrik
LINK
December 31, 2009, 9:58 am
Thank you very much VERY GOOD WEBSITE

REPLY
sekar
LINK
January 1, 2010, 4:16 pm
it is cool
REPLY
LINK
Giriraaj
January 5, 2010, 7:38 am
Thanks for sharing most resourceful information.

REPLY
LINK
Bhagyesh Dhamecha
January 6, 2010, 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 jurnyas well
thank you..
REPLY
LINK
Ganesan AS
January 10, 2010, 1:53 pm
Good info. Thanks for sharing.

May GOD bless you to do more.
REPLY
LINK
Mark Seger
January 10, 2010, 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 doesnt 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, its 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. Id recommend to run
sar with a 10 second sampling level like collectl and youll 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
REPLY
miles
LINK
January 12, 2010, 4:58 am
Amr El-Sharnoby:
atop is awesome, thanks for the tip.
REPLY
Serg
LINK
January 12, 2010, 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 whos 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. )
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LINK
met00
January 12, 2010, 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).
REPLY
LINK
Mark Seger
January 12, 2010, 6:36 pm
re mysql its 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 thats why vi was so slow, it was
trying to write to its 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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LINK
mtituh Alu
January 19, 2010, 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.
REPLY
LINK
nixCraft
January 19, 2010, 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.
REPLY
LINK
kirankumarl
February 3, 2010, 9:26 am
Dear sir pls send me some linex pdf file by wich i can learn how to install
& maintanes
REPLY
LINK
Visigoth
February 21, 2010, 3:11 pm
I like the saidar tool, and iptstate. Check them out.

REPLY
JK
LINK
February 23, 2010, 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..
REPLY
AD
LINK
February 25, 2010, 6:23 am
Thank you very much,,,.

This information is very useful for me to monitoring my server
REPLY
Tarek
LINK
February 26, 2010, 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).
REPLY
LINK
deepu
March 2, 2010, 7:31 am
it is a very good and resourceful infomation.

REPLY
Solo
LINK
March 7, 2010, 11:40 pm
OMG !
Amazing Super Ultra nice info . THX pinguins !
REPLY
vijay
LINK
March 12, 2010, 7:30 am
its so usefulllll thanks a lot

REPLY
LINK
Venu Yadav
March 23, 2010, 5:05 am
Good information. Thanks

REPLY
LINK
Prashant Redkar
March 25, 2010, 7:10 am
Thank you it is very helpful

REPLY
LINK
Saorabh Kumar
March 25, 2010, 12:12 pm
Good knowledge base, great post

REPLY
Spyros
LINK
March 30, 2010, 2:52 am
Very interesting read that really includes the tools that every admin
should know about.
REPLY
LINK
amitabh mishra
March 30, 2010, 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
LINK
Chinmaya
April 2, 2010, 4:48 am
Excellent one !!!

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LINK
saurav
April 3, 2010, 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 processs 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.
REPLY
LINK
Mustafa Ashraf Rahman
April 20, 2010, 1:44 pm
hello Vivek Gite,

This is really a very good post and useful for all admin.
Thanks,
Ashraf
REPLY
arief
LINK
April 21, 2010, 3:23 pm
Great tips..
Thanks
REPLY
LINK
Eduardo Cereto
April 25, 2010, 5:20 am
I think you missed my top 2 monitoring tools:

monit: http://mmonit.com/monit/
mrtg : http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
REPLY
LINK
Lava Kafle
April 29, 2010, 9:05 am
Perfect examples : thanks

REPLY
wolfc01
LINK
May 2, 2010, 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
REPLY
LINK
ohwell
May 2, 2010, 6:33 pm
if an admin doesnt know 90% of those tools, he isnt a real admin. you
will find most of these tools explained in any basic linux howto
REPLY
ravi
LINK
May 3, 2010, 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?
REPLY
LINK
Anonymous
May 7, 2010, 7:17 pm
but how to kill process ID in my server..

REPLY
FHJ
LINK
May 11, 2010, 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
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
its 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!
REPLY
someone
LINK
May 10, 2010, 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.
REPLY
LINK
kalyan de
May 14, 2010, 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
REPLY
LINK
Samuel Egwoyi
May 14, 2010, 9:29 am
how can i practice Mysql using linux

REPLY
Basil
LINK
May 21, 2010, 8:49 pm
This article simply rocks

REPLY
Fenster
LINK
June 1, 2010, 10:24 am
hey, thanks, just installed htop and iptraf, very nice tools!!
REPLY
zim
LINK
June 2, 2010, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Boggles
Have to agree with zim. Atop is a great tool along with its report
generating sister application atopsar. This is a must-have on any server I
manage.
REPLY
Amit
LINK
June 2, 2010, 1:26 pm
Hello,
How to install a Suphp on cpanel.
REPLY
LINK
Walker
June 4, 2010, 4:19 am
Thanks :)
THIS helped me a lot.
REPLY
LINK
m6mb3rtx
June 4, 2010, 4:34 pm
Great article, very userfull tools!

REPLY
LINK
dudhead
June 5, 2010, 2:38 pm
Great list! Missed df command in the list.

REPLY
giftzy
LINK
June 5, 2010, 6:26 pm
I become to love linux after 10 years of hp-ux

REPLY
LINK
Rafael Quirino de Castro
June 7, 2010, 5:08 pm
Im 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
REPLY
georges
LINK
June 9, 2010, 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
REPLY
Naga
LINK
June 13, 2010, 7:19 am
Is there any good tools for analyzing Apache/Tomcat instances.

REPLY
LINK
Jan 'luckyduck' Brinkmann
June 15, 2010, 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
REPLY
LINK
Abdullah
June 16, 2010, 7:15 am
nice list, at the end i think what you meant is Bonus and not bounce
bounce means jump
bonus means extra goodies :)
REPLY
LINK
dust
June 23, 2010, 8:19 am
What is in Linux that is equal to cfgadm in Solaris?

REPLY
LINK
Jerome Christopher
July 6, 2010, 7:55 pm
Thanks for the excellent list of commands, links and info.

Jerome.
REPLY
LINK
sriharikanth
July 12, 2010, 1:49 pm
Thanks, very useful information provided.

REPLY
Jyoti
LINK
July 13, 2010, 9:57 am
very useful
REPLY
t.k.
LINK
July 16, 2010, 10:02 pm
Good compilation of commands. Thanks!

REPLY
LINK
Thomas
August 3, 2010, 5:40 pm
If you want graphy easly your performance data, try BrainyPDM: an

another open source tool! http://www.brainypdm.org
REPLY
LINK
Zanil Hyder
August 4, 2010, 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.
REPLY
LINK
brownman
August 20, 2010, 8:57 am
web-based gui : webmin wins them all

REPLY
chandra
LINK
August 28, 2010, 7:39 am
Hi ite really very very nice which is helful to fresher.

Thanks a lot..
Regards
Amuri Chandra
REPLY
George
LINK
August 30, 2010, 3:53 pm
Great resourceReally helpful for a novice as well for an expert

REPLY
LINK
SHREESAI LUG
hiiiiiiiiiiiii
we r SHREESAI LINUX USER GROUP FRM MUMBAI
THIS COMMANDS R REALLY NICE
THANKS
VIVEK SIR
PLZ REPLY US ON MAIL
REPLY
LINK
Tunitorios
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 ?
REPLY
LINK
Marcelo Cosentino
April 7, 2011, 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.
REPLY
LINK
mark seger
September 12, 2010, 11:48 am
I dont believe that ftp usage by user is recorded anywhere, so youd

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.
-mark
REPLY
jan
LINK
February 24, 2011, 7:42 am
Usually ftp access are recorded in /var/log/messages file (at least

pure-ftpd)
REPLY
sriram
LINK
September 12, 2010, 12:53 pm
Dumpcap is another command which is useful for capturing packets.

Very useful tool
REPLY
LINK
Riadh Rezig
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.
REPLY
LINK
eaman
discus is a nice / light tool to have an idea of file system usage.

REPLY
LINK
Amzath
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
REPLY
Rafiq
LINK
September 20, 2010, 11:45 am
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.
REPLY
LINK
Jalal Hajigholamali
September 20, 2010, 11:54 am
Hi,
use rsync command..
REPLY
leebert
LINK
Dont forget systemtap (stap) which provides the equivalent of Solaris

invaluable dtrace scripting utility. Theres a dtrace for Linux project but I havent
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). Itll 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 (dont 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,
nigels 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.
REPLY
LINK
Lonu Feruz
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
REPLY
LINK
nagaraju
October 1, 2010, 4:47 am
IT IS SUPERB LIST
REPLY
LINK
MAHENDRA SINGH
October 2, 2010, 12:09 pm
thanx
your collection is fantastic.
now i want to know that, how linux works
REPLY
LINK
Rino Rondan
October 7, 2010, 7:37 pm
Thanx !!!
A really completed guide !
REPLY
LINK
games
October 8, 2010, 1:43 am
thank you so much its very usefull for me

REPLY
LINK
sameer
October 15, 2010, 6:14 am
ThanX..!!
can u send basic linux commands with ex
Thanks again
REPLY
LINK
Gunjan
October 17, 2010, 3:42 pm
Nice post, its really useful and helping beginners to resolve server issue
REPLY
Moe
LINK
October 19, 2010, 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 dont want to install a
web-based tool for this.
REPLY
LINK
Stan
April 21, 2011, 12:35 pm
Nice history stats.

REPLY
LINK
vishal sapkal
October 19, 2010, 2:54 pm
very nice
very importan tool of monetering
thanks for .
REPLY
LINK
david a. lawson
October 22, 2010, 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
REPLY
ram
LINK
November 12, 2010, 8:55 am
well,there are so good,i love them!

REPLY
LINK
Nik
November 15, 2010, 5:01 pm
If you want to monitor CPU, memory, I/O and disk usage across multiple
servers you can use Librato Silverline its 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.
REPLY
LINK
Rajkapoor M
November 30, 2010, 12:52 pm
Hi,
Its awasome..thanks to builder..
Thanks&Regards,
Rajkapoor M
REPLY
LINK
jalexandre
December 2, 2010, 12:41 am
Perl?!
REPLY
LINK
jalexandre
December 2, 2010, 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.
REPLY
LINK
Sarath Babu M
December 11, 2010, 9:07 am
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
REPLY
Laxman
LINK
December 23, 2010, 9:37 am
Very interesting I will try

I hope itll help for me
REPLY
sah
LINK
December 23, 2010, 10:19 pm
thanks alot its a great help~!

REPLY
KK
LINK
December 25, 2010, 4:19 am
Sumo is the best, the best that ever was and the best that ever will be.
Way to go Sumo
REPLY
LINK
Deepak
January 6, 2011, 1:18 pm
Thanks . This is really helpful.

REPLY
mark
LINK
January 7, 2011, 7:05 am
How would I get a list of slow running websites on my server via ssh?
REPLY
LINK
nigratruo
January 13, 2011, 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.
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)
REPLY
LINK
coldslushy
February 7, 2011, 12:55 pm
Colors? Too resource intensive

REPLY
LINK
josh
July 19, 2011, 3:38 pm
Colors do not always contrast well with the background.

REPLY
LINK
abdul hameed
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
REPLY
LINK
Vimal
February 9, 2011, 8:02 pm
Shit, this looks great! Thanks very much.

REPLY
Michael
LINK
February 10, 2011, 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 todays machines, not Ghz Mhz!). So much was added so quickly
into 4.2 (kernels were no longer a few hundred kilobytes at most) 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 didnt 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.
Todays 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 dont 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 todays machines being so much faster. And forget about
Windows!
REPLY
LINK
benjamin ngobi
February 15, 2011, 3:44 pm
wow these are great tools one should know.thank you so much coz it
just makes me better every day
REPLY
Mousin
LINK
February 16, 2011, 9:52 am
Awesome Thanks a ton worth a bookmark..

REPLY
krishna
LINK
February 23, 2011, 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!
REPLY
LINK
krishna
March 4, 2011, 1:08 pm
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..
REPLY
vasu
1) lshw
LINK
April 16, 2011, 2:07 am
3) w user
REPLY
LINK
Ryan Barrett
March 1, 2011, 2:59 pm
Thanks great post!

REPLY
ysha
LINK
March 4, 2011, 5:06 am
thanks.. i love it
REPLY
LINK
Rohit Shrivastava
March 10, 2011, 5:01 am
Very good for beginners as well as professional. Thank you very much
Sir for sharing your knowledge. I really appreciate.
REPLY
ctian
LINK
March 11, 2011, 8:41 am
nice one. it really works for a newby like me

REPLY
Michael
LINK
March 17, 2011, 7:01 am
This is really helpful. I know these tools, but did not use them well. Many
thanks for your tips.

REPLY
LINK
PRADEEP
March 28, 2011, 4:33 am
I ve updated kernelnow i need to update it without restart the server.

Plz help.
REPLY
John
LINK
April 5, 2011, 9:29 pm
cant see nload on the list , easy showing of whats going on with your
network..
nload eth0 should show rest.
REPLY
Parthyz
LINK
April 12, 2011, 6:30 am
Great Work man.. thanks a lot..

REPLY
LINK
Matias
April 12, 2011, 12:46 pm
Nice list. I would add LogWatch, to send daily reports to your mail.
REPLY
LINK
sasidaran
April 15, 2011, 5:16 am
Good collection of commands.

REPLY
LINK
TiTiMan
April 15, 2011, 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
and
Find Out top 10 CPU Consuming Process
REPLY
LINK
vasu
April 16, 2011, 2:07 am
top
REPLY
Me
LINK
June 7, 2013, 4:33 pm
Thanks for the typo correction; command works for me now.

REPLY
LINK
Sachin Jain
April 18, 2011, 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??
REPLY
chandu
LINK
May 6, 2011, 3:06 am
Plz help me how write the firewall rules in linux.

REPLY
LINK
Jalal Hajigholamali
May 6, 2011, 12:40 pm
Hi,
see manual page of iptables and get examples from google
REPLY
LINK
cypherb0g
useful stuff!
REPLY
LINK
May 6, 2011, 7:56 pm
sudipta
June 3, 2011, 4:58 am
GR8 effort Worth 2 b appreciated

REPLY
Liunx
LINK
June 10, 2011, 7:56 am
Thats great!
thanks very much.
REPLY
LINK
foster
June 16, 2011, 11:13 pm
Nagios fork Icinga should be on peoples radar as well.

https://www.icinga.org/
REPLY
LINK
Jalaluddin
June 24, 2011, 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
REPLY
LINK
Adil Husain
June 30, 2011, 10:43 am
Nice list ill bookmark it for quick ref.

REPLY
LINK
Bhanu Kashyap
July 9, 2011, 5:26 pm
Its Very Useful For Us.

Thanks.!!
REPLY
LINK
Raivis
July 12, 2011, 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 doesnt require snmp. It consists only of some shell and perl
scripts.
REPLY
LINK
Aviv.A
July 14, 2011, 10:30 pm
You forgot the command htop :D

REPLY
LINK
Laurens
July 15, 2011, 10:16 pm
An other interesting program wich hasnt been mentioned yet is Midnight

Commander (mc). At least its 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.
REPLY
LINK
Sravi Raj
July 19, 2011, 5:03 am
Nice List
REPLY
andy
LINK
July 21, 2011, 8:48 am
NO PRINT FUNKTION ? BIG FAIL IN YOUR FACEdamn why is every

hole blogging but a printfunktion is missing ? i dont need the scrappie comments
in my prints..
REPLY
LINK
Tommie
Nice Roundup. However, I love you not having a print function. I am

able to print what I need without it ;)
htop missing? :)
REPLY
LINK
nixCraft
September 11, 2011, 12:21 pm
To see a print version just append /print to the end of the url.
REPLY
LINK
GEORGE FAREED
July 25, 2011, 8:43 pm
thaaaaaaaaaaaanks alot :)
its useful informations :)
REPLY
LINK
apparao
August 3, 2011, 11:36 am
Thanks
REPLY
LINK
kiran.somidi
August 3, 2011, 12:47 pm
traceroute
REPLY
LINK
kiran.somidi
August 3, 2011, 12:49 pm
tarceroute coomand is not their

REPLY
LINK
Lalit Sharma
August 7, 2011, 2:13 pm
how can i copy all this?
REPLY
LINK
amit lamba
August 29, 2011, 8:16 am
m using ubuntu 9.10 on system but problem is regarding internet .

unable to connect with internet
waiting for useful reply
REPLY
LINK
Daniel Brasil
August 30, 2011, 10:03 pm
Very good post. Ive some problems trying to figure out historical data
about disk usage. I still dont know a good tool for that. sar is wonderful but its
unable to record disk usage per process. You know any tool for that?
REPLY
LINK
greg
January 6, 2012, 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.
REPLY
jock
LINK
Its great, but im 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?
REPLY
LINK
greg
January 6, 2012, 7:13 pm
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)
REPLY
eeb2
LINK
Thanks for posting this list. Keep up the good posts!

REPLY
LINK
khupcom
Im using monitorix and vnstat to monitor my servers

REPLY
LINK
Gaurav kuamr jha
October 2, 2011, 7:42 am
Great it was bagger description for me.

This is article has solved my lot of problems
thanks for this
gkjha009
REPLY
LINK
x@y.com
October 8, 2011, 10:14 am
thanks :)
REPLY
LINK
Peter Green
October 15, 2011, 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
REPLY
LINK
cirrus
October 21, 2011, 10:44 am
great post cuz , very informative for recent nix converts PCLinuxOS#1
REPLY
LINK
David Bothwell
November 3, 2011, 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 Gnomes System
Monitor and I would love get your feedback on it. Thanks.
REPLY
LINK
Ferenc Varga
November 4, 2011, 10:06 pm
for http traffic, i suggest to use justniffer.
REPLY
LINK
bishow
November 8, 2011, 2:22 pm
yeah really nice post !!!

Its 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,
REPLY
Unni
LINK
November 11, 2011, 1:39 am
Well written , keep up the good work ..

.
Thanks,
Unni
REPLY
LINK
Gmaster
December 2, 2011, 12:30 pm
Great job in compiling all the utils in one nice post. Thank you very
much!
REPLY
Denis
LINK
December 9, 2011, 10:30 pm
Great stuff, nice to have it all in one place. :-)

REPLY
LINK
manna
December 12, 2011, 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 users website, which
they are accessing in office hours,Please any one suggest me with correct
command. Thanks
REPLY
LINK
Sibbala Govardhan Raju
December 13, 2011, 10:08 am
Dear Sir,
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
REPLY
LINK
Kash
January 15, 2012, 2:41 pm
This is monitoring article not backup article??? Search your question

somewhere else.
REPLY
LINK
bhaskar
February 6, 2012, 7:57 pm
Hi, Im 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,
REPLY
Steve
LINK
February 13, 2012, 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.
REPLY
AL
LINK
February 24, 2012, 12:55 pm
There is another tool we use for system monitoring, its from IBM called
NMON pretty good tool, I recommend it.
AL
REPLY
LINK
sudhir menon
March 21, 2012, 7:10 am
nfsiostat is a great small command on linux

REPLY
LINK
nishhhh
March 22, 2012, 2:15 pm
nice collection..referencing related articles are like feathers in the cap !!

appreciate it..thanks!
REPLY
LINK
naveen
March 23, 2012, 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
REPLY
LINK
naveen
March 23, 2012, 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
REPLY
LTJX
LINK
August 2, 2012, 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? Isnt 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 dont really seem to
enforce the purchase requirement, unless a freeloader is annoying or being
offensive to other customers, etc.
REPLY
Stan
LINK
August 6, 2012, 6:25 am
Have you tried MRTG to monitor your routers. More for just
network
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
REPLY
Eric
LINK
April 6, 2012, 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)
REPLY
LINK
sudarshan
April 11, 2012, 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
REPLY
LINK
Prasad
August 17, 2012, 6:23 pm
Just do
# uname
for specific details do:
# uname help
REPLY
Navneet
LINK
April 21, 2012, 10:34 am
Thanks Vivek,
For Posting this. It is very useful for Beginners as well.
Keep the Great work going on..
REPLY
LINK
Shreyansh Modi
May 2, 2012, 6:04 pm
Great Share :)
After using a few of these commands I am feeling like I am an Linux Operations
Engineer ;)
REPLY
Ravi
LINK
May 9, 2012, 6:17 pm
Great and useful information.

Thanks
REPLY
LINK
Michael
May 10, 2012, 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 ;)
REPLY
LINK
Omar Osorio
June 5, 2012, 8:27 pm
lshw -short
REPLY
vvvv
LINK
June 12, 2012, 3:50 am
I Liked it too thank you)

REPLY
LINK
oran00b
June 16, 2012, 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!
REPLY
LINK
darkfader
July 3, 2012, 5:14 pm
Learn to use sar well and youll never need to use iostat, vmstat, etc.
REPLY
LINK
William G. Loughran
July 11, 2012, 1:32 pm
Excellent cant thank you enough.

Not sure what CIFS tools we were using not SAMBA
REPLY
LINK
Vichuz
July 12, 2012, 2:17 am
Keep up the nice work.

REPLY
LINK
seema
July 17, 2012, 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
REPLY
LINK
Sandeep
July 17, 2012, 12:19 pm
Its really useful .nice one..I liked it!!!

REPLY
LINK
Praveen Reddy
July 19, 2012, 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
REPLY
Chetan
LINK
July 25, 2012, 7:40 am
One of my fav network traffic monitoring tool is iftop

REPLY
LINK
Don Saulo
August 2, 2012, 10:54 am
Good job, guys!

Thanks for share.
REPLY
netman
LINK
August 26, 2012, 3:49 am
thanks for your good articles

REPLY
balwant
LINK
very very nice..

REPLY
LINK
chinta
October 1, 2012, 3:01 pm
very usefull
REPLY
LINK
Carlos A. Junior
October 1, 2012, 4:35 pm
+1
Great postnow im think more prepared to find an strange memory usage on
apache server .
Great post.
REPLY
Anup
LINK
October 5, 2012, 11:57 am
Nice job
REPLY
LINK
Richard Cain
October 11, 2012, 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 whats holding things up.
REPLY
LINK
Girijesh
October 16, 2012, 3:54 am
very informative!!!
Thanks a ton.. :)
REPLY
LINK
Shekhar
October 22, 2012, 9:30 am
What is tool to get All activity info. Like any user create/delete/move file
or directory information???
REPLY
LINK
Rahul
November 8, 2012, 9:26 am
+100
REPLY
LINK
Hannes Dorn
November 8, 2012, 10:46 pm
Instead of Cacti I prefer munin. Installation and configuration is easy and

on monitored systems, only a small client is needed.
REPLY
xuedi
LINK
November 11, 2012, 5:50 pm
I would replace top with htop, it extents top with a much nicer ncurses
and lots of functions
REPLY
Bill
LINK
November 14, 2012, 3:02 pm
Great list, Shekhar For File Activity etc, I use vigil and vlog client to
create the logs
REPLY
LINK
Vishal
November 15, 2012, 6:26 am
try one for tool to report network interfaces bandwith just like
vmstat/iostat
# ifstat
REPLY
LINK
Vishnuprasad
November 25, 2012, 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!
REPLY
LINK
Vishnuprasad
November 25, 2012, 3:43 pm
A better Server Management Software

http://www.webmin.com/
Cheers!
REPLY
LINK
Konstantin
November 28, 2012, 3:02 am
Id also add monit utility, to monitor assorted services and perform

actions 9such as restarting the stopped service).
REPLY
LINK
jlarchev
December 15, 2012, 7:21 am
Hi all,
A nice monitoring tool were using for years :
http://sysusage.darold.net
REPLY
LINK
pechalbata.com
January 2, 2013, 2:52 pm
Great tool! Thanks!

REPLY
LINK
Uday Vallamsetty
December 31, 2012, 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.
REPLY
Lucy
LINK
January 2, 2013, 11:11 pm
Thank you for this great post is it very helpful for someone that is starting
out.
REPLY
LINK
peter
January 11, 2013, 5:04 am
very useful article..im a reader of both nixcraft and cyberciti.. well done
REPLY
veera
LINK
Very nice Thanks for the effort..

REPLY
sinlir
LINK
February 8, 2013, 10:29 am
Very nice!
REPLY
LINK
wanie
February 12, 2013, 10:38 am
Hi..
i would know about your opinioni must do the project about monitoring devices
availability
what the software in linux about this and i must editing the coding software.
REPLY
LINK
Ankit Srivastava
February 26, 2013, 10:01 pm
You guys are awesome.

I love this website :)
REPLY
LINK
Mayur
April 19, 2013, 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
REPLY
LINK
chandan
June 1, 2013, 6:56 am
It helped me a lot.
Thanks a lot and even more.
REPLY
LINK
Shreehari
June 4, 2013, 12:31 pm
Its really awesome!!

REPLY
LINK
mohsin
June 6, 2013, 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
REPLY
LINK
nickchacha
June 8, 2013, 11:38 am
This are very helpful tips. Thank you chief.

Am a newbie in SysAdmin and i this commands will come in hardy.
REPLY
LINK
Kristoffer
June 14, 2013, 3:43 pm
Dont forget cowsay!

REPLY
LINK
Thusitha Nuwan
July 1, 2013, 4:28 am
Thanks very much for this list.

It was very useful.
REPLY
LINK
Lukey
July 20, 2013, 12:55 am
Im using the Helper MonkeyTool as a portable ssh Java based

interface for Unix/Linux system administration and monitirng.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sshadmincontrol/files/
REPLY
LINK
jasoncabahug
July 22, 2013, 5:26 am
thankz for this tips it was very useful

to me.. get more updates about open source..=)
REPLY
LINK
BinaryTides
July 28, 2013, 4:08 am
Thanks, the list is very useful

REPLY
LINK
Rajkumar kathane
hi
thank u for sharing ur knowledge very useful.
REPLY
LINK
erm3nda
September 27, 2013, 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 whats on your hands :)
So many thanks again.
REPLY
vikas
LINK
October 28, 2013, 1:28 pm
great help thanks a ton

REPLY
dk
LINK
November 5, 2013, 4:25 am
kindly share some usefull linux commands and configuration setup

REPLY
Ramesh
LINK
Excellent Article
REPLY
LINK
Piyush Dangodra
January 7, 2014, 3:29 am
Excellent Post keep up the good work : )

REPLY
LINK
maltris
January 11, 2014, 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
REPLY
LINK
Mahesh Vakharia
March 7, 2014, 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.
REPLY
LINK
tungdt
March 22, 2014, 2:52 pm
Very useful article.thanks

REPLY
LINK
Wellington Torrejais da Silva
June 24, 2014, 7:31 pm
Thanks!!!
REPLY
LINK
Dev jha
September 22, 2014, 11:43 am
wow.its cooooool
thank you very much.
REPLY
LINK
Vakharia Mahesh
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
REPLY
LINK
Fahad
October 30, 2014, 3:16 pm
Excellent post!!
REPLY
Fuxy
LINK
top is old install and use htop its way better.

REPLY
LINK
Michiel Klaver
December 10, 2014, 9:50 am
I missed /proc/slabinfo and the slabtop command?

REPLY
LINK
qdenker
January 15, 2015, 5:38 pm
A little notify in terms of ps aux and ps -aux

cite:
Note that ps -aux is distinct from ps aux. The POSIX and UNIX standards
require that ps -aux print all processes owned by a user named x, as well as
printing all processes that would be selected by the -a option. If the user named
x does not exist, this ps may interpret the command as ps aux instead and print
a warning.
quelle: http://superuser.com/questions/394414/ps-warns-me-about-bad-syntaxwith-aux-options
REPLY
Raj
LINK
January 27, 2015, 11:04 am
Hi,
Can not telnet to Debian 6.0 from Windows Box.
I have downloaded the file: telnetd_0.17-36_i386.deb and installed it on Debian
6.0 box using dpkg -i command. It was installed successfully. But I still do not find
the telnetd process under the ps -aef output.
How do I start the telnetd process automatically so that I can telnet to it from
Windows box?
Thanks.
REPLY
Jz
LINK
October 24, 2015, 3:58 am
Need to add atop to the list. Love that one.

REPLY
sani
LINK
January 29, 2016, 7:15 pm
ashmon is another With nice gui .

https://github.com/ashtum/ashmon/
REPLY
Rajesh
LINK
February 17, 2016, 11:07 am
Hi Vivek and all,

Its a very useful site. Iam about to complete my RHCE and currently residing in
banglore ,plz guide with more of these linux topics on my mail:
rajeshnarayanbe@gmail.com and how to face the interview as a sysadmin fresher
I would be pleased if you even mail me about job openings in and around
banglore which would be very helpful.
I hope I would join the beautiful world of linux..
Thanx Mr.Vivek for introducing me to various monitoring tools
REPLY
LINK
Bushmills
April 7, 2016, 2:04 pm
munin beats cacti, IMHO.

lsblk list block devices.
watch repeat a one-off executing CLI program, that way generating dynamically
updating output.
REPLY
LINK
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MENU

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every

eed to monitor Linux server performance? Try these

distributions are equipped with tons of monitoring. These tools

#1: top Process Activity Command

Fig.01: Linux top command

Commonly Used Hot Keys

Displays summary information off and on.

Displays memory information off and on.

Enables you to interactively select the ordering within top.

Issues renice command.

Issues kill command.

Turn on or off color/mono

=> Related: How do I Find Out Linux CPU Utilization?

#2: vmstat System Activity, Hardware and System Information

IO, traps, and cpu activity.

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-----r b

0 2540988 522188 5130400

0 2540988 522188 5130400

720 1199 665 1 0 99 0 0

0 2540956 522188 5130400

0 2540956 522188 5130500

0 2540940 522188 5130512

536 1189 932 1 0 98 0 0

0 2538444 522188 5130588

0 2490060 522188 5130640

Display Memory Utilization Slabinfo

Get Information About Active / Inactive Memory Pages

17:58:47 up 5 days, 20:28, 2 users, load average: 0.36, 0.26, 0.24

5.00s 0.04s 0.02s vim /etc/resolv.conf

0.00s 0.03s 0.00s w

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

#5: ps Displays The Processes

ps is just like top but provides more information.

To See Threads ( LWP and NLWP)

To See Threads After Processes

Print All Process On The Server

Print A Process Tree

Print Security Information

See Every Process Running As User Vivek

Set Output In a User-Defined Format

Display Only The Process IDs of Lighttpd

Display The Name of PID 55977

Find Out The Top 10 Memory Consuming Process

Find Out top 10 CPU Consuming Process

#6: free Memory Usage

#7: iostat Average CPU Load, Disk Activity

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 (www03.nixcraft.in) 06/26/2009

%nice %system %iowait %steal

=> Related: : Linux Track NFS Directory / Disk I/O Stats

#8: sar Collect and Report System Activity

To display the network counters from the 24th:

You can also display real time usage using sar:

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 (www03.nixcraft.in)

#9: mpstat Multiprocessor Usage

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 (www03.nixcraft.in)

#10: pmap Process Memory Usage

To display process memory information for pid # 47394, enter:

Kbytes Mode Offset

2584 r-x-- 0000000000000000 008:00002 php-cgi

140 rw--- 0000000000286000 008:00002 php-cgi

52 rw--- 00000000008a9000 000:00000

76 rw--- 00000000002a8000 008:00002 php-cgi

1980 rw--- 000000000f678000 000:00000