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20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know

by Vivek Gite on June 27, 2009 · 266 comments

Need to monitor Linux server performance? Try these built-in command 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 Key Usage

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

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

#2: vmstat - System Activity, Hardware and System Information

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

Sample Outputs:
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 0 0 2 32 4 2 4 1 96 0 0
1 0 0 2540988 522188 5130400 0 0 0 720 1199 665 1 0 99 0 0
0 0 0 2540956 522188 5130400 0 0 0 0 1151 1569 4 1 95 0 0
0 0 0 2540956 522188 5130500 0 0 0 6 1117 439 1 0 99 0 0
0 0 0 2540940 522188 5130512 0 0 0 536 1189 932 1 0 98 0 0
0 0 0 2538444 522188 5130588 0 0 0 0 1187 1417 4 1 96 0 0
0 0 0 2490060 522188 5130640 0 0 0 18 1253 1123 5 1 94 0 0

Display Memory Utilization Slabinfo

# vmstat -m

Get Information About Active / Inactive Memory Pages

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

#3: w - Find Out Who Is Logged on And What They Are Doing
w command displays information about the users currently on the machine, and their processes.
# w username
# w vivek
Sample Outputs:

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

USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root pts/0 10.1.3.145 14:55 5.00s 0.04s 0.02s vim /etc/resolv.conf
root pts/1 10.1.3.145 17:43 0.00s 0.03s 0.00s w

#4: uptime - Tell How Long The System Has Been Running

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

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

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

#5: ps - Displays The Processes

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

PID TTY TIME CMD

1 ? 00:00:02 init
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
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 used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 12302896 9739664 2563232 0 523124 5154740
-/+ buffers/cache: 4061800 8241096
Swap: 1052248 0 1052248

=> Related: :

1. Linux Find Out Virtual Memory PAGESIZE

2. Linux Limit CPU Usage Per Process
3. How much RAM does my Ubuntu / Fedora Linux desktop PC have?

#7: iostat - Average CPU Load, Disk Activity

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

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

avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
3.50 0.09 0.51 0.03 0.00 95.86
Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn
sda 22.04 31.88 512.03 16193351 260102868
sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 2166 180
sda2 22.04 31.87 512.03 16189010 260102688
sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 1615 0
sda3 0.00 0.00 0.00 1615 0

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

#8: sar - Collect and Report System Activity

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

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

06:45:12 PM CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
06:45:16 PM all 2.00 0.00 0.22 0.00 0.00 97.78
06:45:20 PM all 2.07 0.00 0.38 0.03 0.00 97.52
06:45:24 PM all 0.94 0.00 0.28 0.00 0.00 98.78
06:45:28 PM all 1.56 0.00 0.22 0.00 0.00 98.22
06:45:32 PM all 3.53 0.00 0.25 0.03 0.00 96.19
Average: all 2.02 0.00 0.27 0.01 0.00 97.70

=> Related: : How to collect Linux system utilization data into a file

#9: mpstat - Multiprocessor Usage

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

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

06:48:11 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s
06:48:11 PM all 3.50 0.09 0.34 0.03 0.01 0.17 0.00 95.86 1218.04
06:48:11 PM 0 3.44 0.08 0.31 0.02 0.00 0.12 0.00 96.04 1000.31
06:48:11 PM 1 3.10 0.08 0.32 0.09 0.02 0.11 0.00 96.28 34.93
06:48:11 PM 2 4.16 0.11 0.36 0.02 0.00 0.11 0.00 95.25 0.00
06:48:11 PM 3 3.77 0.11 0.38 0.03 0.01 0.24 0.00 95.46 44.80
06:48:11 PM 4 2.96 0.07 0.29 0.04 0.02 0.10 0.00 96.52 25.91
06:48:11 PM 5 3.26 0.08 0.28 0.03 0.01 0.10 0.00 96.23 14.98
06:48:11 PM 6 4.00 0.10 0.34 0.01 0.00 0.13 0.00 95.42 3.75
06:48:11 PM 7 3.30 0.11 0.39 0.03 0.01 0.46 0.00 95.69 76.89

=> Related: : Linux display each multiple SMP CPU processors utilization individually.

#10: pmap - Process Memory Usage

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

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

The last line is very important:

mapped: 933712K total amount of memory mapped to files

writeable/private: 4304K the amount of private address space
shared: 768000K the amount of address space this process is sharing with others

=> Related: : Linux find the memory used by a program / process using pmap command

#11 and #12: netstat and ss - Network Statistics

The command netstat displays network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, masquerade connections, and multicast memberships. ss command is used to dump
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
#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 /proc/cpuinfo
# cat /proc/meminfo
# cat /proc/zoneinfo
# cat /proc/mounts

17#: Nagios - Server And Network Monitoring

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

18#: Cacti - Web-based Monitoring Tool

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

#19: KDE System Guard - Real-time Systems Reporting and Graphing

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

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

See the KSysguard handbook for detailed usage.

#20: Gnome System Monitor - Real-time Systems Reporting and Graphing

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

Displays various basic information about the computer's hardware and software.
Linux Kernel version
GNOME version
Hardware
Installed memory
Processors and speeds
System Status
Currently available disk space
Processes
Memory and swap space
Network usage
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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{ 266 comments… read them below or add one }

1 VonSkippy June 27, 2009

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

Reply

2 Jim (JR) March 21, 2011

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

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

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

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

Jim (JR)

Reply

3 Steve August 3, 2011

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

4 Mike Williams August 15, 2011

Because a lot of us have to live with faulty memory modules, Steve.

I do agree with you too.:This knowledge isn’t that common outside the comic book fraternity.

Reply

5 robb June 27, 2009

yeap most of them are must-have tools.

good job of collecting them in a post.

Reply

6 Chris June 27, 2009

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

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

Reply

7 ftaurino June 27, 2009

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

8 James June 27, 2009

pocess or process. haha, i love typos

Reply

9 Sohrab Khan March 15, 2011

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

10 vasu March 21, 2011

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

11 darkdragn May 31, 2011

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

Reply

12 Artur June 27, 2009

What about Munin ? Lots easier and lighter than Cacti.

Reply

13 nig belamp December 7, 2010

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

Reply

14 PC4N6 April 20, 2011

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

Reply
 Reply

15 RB-211 May 13, 2011

Wow, that was a bit harsh.

Reply

16 grammer nazi July 24, 2011

it is you’re – you are a tool. Please when randomly slamming someones post to feel better about yourself, at least you proper grammer. Then at least you
sound like an intelligent a55h0le. :P

Reply

17 Jeff August 9, 2011

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

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

Reply

18 David August 25, 2011

A ban? Censorship! You Nazi!

Reply

19 Roberto September 9, 2011

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

Reply

20 Fireman October 17, 2011

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

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

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

Reply

21 flame on! December 4, 2011

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

Reply

22 Raj June 27, 2009

Nice list, worth bookmarking!

Reply

23 kaosmonk June 27, 2009

Once again, great article!!

Reply

24 Amr El-Sharnoby June 27, 2009

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

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

To use it efficiently on RHEL , CentOS;

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

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

Reply
25 Vivek Gite June 27, 2009
25 Vivek Gite June 27, 2009

@Chris / James

Thanks for the heads-up!

Reply

26 Solaris June 27, 2009

Great post, also great reference.

Reply

27 quba June 27, 2009

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

28 Cristiano June 27, 2009

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

29 Peko June 27, 2009

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

Reply

30 paul tergeist June 27, 2009

maybe it’s a typo too, but the title should be :

“.. Tools Every SysAdmin MUST Know”
and still, this is advanced user knowledge, at most. I would not trust a sysadmin that knows so few. And..

Reply

31 harrywwc June 27, 2009

Hi guys,

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

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

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

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

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

/me gets down off his soapbox

.h

Reply

32 StygianAgenda February 28, 2011

I totally second that!

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

Reply

33 Lolcatz April 7, 2011

 33 Lolcatz April 7, 2011

Typos*

Reply

34 roflcopter June 24, 2011

Typographical error*

Reply

35 Pádraig Brady June 27, 2009

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

I also summarised a few linux monitoring tools here

I’d also mention the powertop utility

Reply

36 Saad June 27, 2009

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

37 Jack June 28, 2009

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

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

Reply

38 StygianAgenda February 28, 2011

I just became an instant fan of ‘whowatch’. Thanks!!! ;)

Reply

39 Ponzu June 28, 2009

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

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40 Manoj April 27, 2011

It is not a tool. It is an Editor

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41 su - July 28, 2011

An editor is a tool for text documents.

Reply

42 Eric schulman June 28, 2009

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

Reply

43 Ashok kumar June 28, 2009

hi gud information , keep it up

ash

Reply

44 Enzo June 28, 2009

You missed: iftop & nethogs

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45 Adrian Fita June 28, 2009

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
 Reply

46 Knightsream June 28, 2009

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

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47 praveen k June 28, 2009

I would like to add

whoami ,who am i, finger, pinky , id commands

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48 create own website June 28, 2009

i always love linux, great article

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49 Mathieu Desnoyers June 28, 2009

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

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

Mathieu

Reply

50 Andy Leo June 29, 2009

Very useful, well done. Thanks!

Reply

51 Aveek Sen June 29, 2009

Very informative.

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52 The Hulk June 29, 2009

I love this website.

Reply

53 kburger June 29, 2009

If we’re talking about a web server, apachetop is a nice tool to see Apache’s activity.

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54 Ram June 29, 2009

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

55 Kartik Mistry June 29, 2009

`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

56 Vivek Gite June 29, 2009

@Everyone

Thanks for sharing all your tools with us.

Reply

57 feilong June 29, 2009

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.
 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

58 boz June 29, 2009

mtr

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59 Scyldinga June 29, 2009

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

No reference to configuration management tools ?

cfengine/puppet/chef?

Reply

60 Ken McDonell June 29, 2009

Nice summary article.

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

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

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

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

Reply

61 Lance June 30, 2009

I love your collection.

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

Thanks for compiling this list.

Reply

62 bogo June 30, 2009

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

Reply

63 MEHTA GHANSHYAM June 30, 2009

REALLY ITS VERY GOOD N USEFULL FOR ALL ADMIN.

THANKS ONCE AGAIN

Reply

64 fasil June 30, 2009

Good post…already bookmarked… cheers

Reply

65 Aleksey Tsalolikhin June 30, 2009

I’ll just mention “ngrep” – network grep.

Great list, thanks!!

Aleksey

Reply

66 Abdul Kayyum July 1, 2009

Thanks for sharing this information..

Reply

67 Aurelio July 1, 2009

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

Reply
68 komradebob July 1, 2009
68 komradebob July 1, 2009

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

Reply

69 pradeep July 2, 2009

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

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70 Jay July 4, 2009

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

71 Manuel Fraga July 5, 2009

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

72 aR July 6, 2009

thanks for sharing all the helpful tools.

Reply

73 Shailesh Mishra July 7, 2009

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

74 Bjarne Rasmussen July 7, 2009

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

Reply

75 Balaji July 12, 2009

Very much Useful Information’s,

trafmon is one more useful tool

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76 Stefan July 15, 2009

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

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77 Raja July 19, 2009

Awesome. Especially love the ps tips. Very interesting

Reply

78 Rajat July 24, 2009

Thanks very good info!!!

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79 nima0102 July 27, 2009

It’s really nice :)

Reply
80 David Thomas August 12, 2009
80 David Thomas August 12, 2009

Excellent list!

Reply

81 Vinidog August 29, 2009

Nice… very nice guy!!!! ;-)

Reply

82 Bob Marcan September 4, 2009

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

83 Tman September 5, 2009

For professional network monitoring use Zenoss:

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

Reply

84 Somnath Pal September 14, 2009

Hi,

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

Best Regards,
Somnath

Reply

85 Eddy September 17, 2009

I did not see ifconfig or iwconfig on the list

Reply

86 Kestev September 17, 2009

openNMS

Reply

87 Sergiy September 25, 2009

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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88 Mark Seger September 28, 2009

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

I think I succeeded on many fronts, in particular not having to worry if the right data is being collected. Just install rpm and type “/etc/init.d/collectl start” and you’re
collecting everything such as slabs and processes every 60 seconds and everything else every 10 seconds AND using <0.1% of the CPU to do so. I personally believe if
you're collecting performance counters at a minute or coarser you're not really seeing what your system is doing.
 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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89 PeteG September 29, 2009

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

Thanks again.

Reply

90 Denilson October 26, 2009

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

Reply

91 AndrewW November 5, 2009

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

92 Abhijit November 10, 2009

Zabbix open source monitoring tool

http://www.zabbix.com

Reply

93 greg January 6, 2012

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

I’ve been following it since its early days and its come a long way. Its sad that lists like this never give it its due, not even a foot note mention.

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

Reply

94 Kevin November 15, 2009

Thanks, good work

Reply

95 Stefano November 22, 2009

Just thanks! :)

Reply

96 GBonev November 25, 2009

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
97 Gokul December 7, 2009
97 Gokul December 7, 2009

How to install the Kickstart method in linux

Reply

98 Bilal Ahmad December 8, 2009

Very nice collection.. Worth a bookmark…Bravo…

Reply

99 Jalal Hajigholamali December 9, 2009

Thanks a lot…

Reply

100 mancai December 11, 2009

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

Reply

101 aruinanjan December 14, 2009

This is a nice document for new user, thaks to owner of this document.

arun

Reply

102 myghty December 16, 2009

Great post!! Thanks.

Reply

103 Rakib Hasan December 16, 2009

Very helpful. Thanks a lot!

Reply

104 PRR December 22, 2009

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

thank you. It’s very handy.

Reply

105 Yusuf December 25, 2009

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

106 Yusuf December 25, 2009

I meant to thank Vivek Gita

once again awesome job

Reply

107 Shrik December 31, 2009

Thank you very much VERY GOOD WEBSITE

Reply

108 sekar January 1, 2010

it is cool

Reply

109 Giriraaj January 5, 2010

Thanks for sharing most resourceful information.

Reply
110 Bhagyesh Dhamecha January 6, 2010
110 Bhagyesh Dhamecha January 6, 2010

Dear all Members,

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

thanks and continue this jurny…as well

thank you..

Reply

111 Ganesan AS January 10, 2010

Good info. Thanks for sharing.

May GOD bless you to do more.

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112 Mark Seger January 10, 2010

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

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

-mark

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113 miles January 12, 2010

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

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114 Serg January 12, 2010

hi Mark

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

Reply

115 met00 January 12, 2010

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

116 Mark Seger January 12, 2010

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

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

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

-mark

Reply

117 mtituh Alu January 19, 2010

117 mtituh Alu January 19, 2010

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.

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118 Vivek Gite January 19, 2010

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.

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119 kirankumarl February 3, 2010

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

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120 Visigoth February 21, 2010

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

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121 JK February 23, 2010

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

122 AD February 25, 2010

Thank you very much,,,….

This information is very useful for me to monitoring my server…

Reply

123 Tarek February 26, 2010

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

124 deepu March 2, 2010

it is a very good and resourceful infomation.

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125 Solo March 7, 2010

OMG !

Amazing – Super – Ultra nice info . THX pinguins !

Reply

126 vijay March 12, 2010

its so usefulllll thanks a lot

Reply

127 Venu Yadav March 23, 2010

Good information. Thanks

Reply

128 Prashant Redkar March 25, 2010

Thank you it is very helpful

Reply

129 Saorabh Kumar March 25, 2010

Good knowledge base, great post

Reply

130 Spyros March 30, 2010

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

131 amitabh mishra March 30, 2010

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

132 Chinmaya April 2, 2010

Excellent one !!!

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133 saurav April 3, 2010

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

ulimit

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

Syntax
ulimit [-acdfHlmnpsStuv] [limit]

Options

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

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

-a All current limits are reported.

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

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

Reply

134 Mustafa Ashraf Rahman April 20, 2010

hello Vivek Gite,

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

Reply

135 arief April 21, 2010

Great tips..
Thanks

Reply

136 Eduardo Cereto April 25, 2010

I think you missed my top 2 monitoring tools:

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

Reply

137 Lava Kafle April 29, 2010

Perfect examples : thanks

Reply

138 wolfc01 May 2, 2010

 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

139 ohwell May 2, 2010

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

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140 Anonymous May 7, 2010

but how to kill process ID in my server..

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141 FHJ May 11, 2010

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 it’s
easy to read). You type the number and “enter”, will have to confirm (y), and the process is killed with -15. Which is less “severe” than a “kill -9″ which really kills
just about any process (without allowing it a graceful exit of any kind).

Use with care!

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142 someone May 10, 2010

Gnome system monitor is a pretty useless utility if you ask me.

its neat to have it as an applet, but thats it.

Reply

143 kalyan de May 14, 2010

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

144 Samuel Egwoyi May 14, 2010

how can i practice Mysql using linux

Reply

145 Basil May 21, 2010

This article simply rocks

Reply

146 Fenster June 1, 2010

hey, thanks, just installed htop and iptraf, very nice tools!!

Reply

147 zim June 2, 2010

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

148 Boggles September 21, 2011

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

Reply

149 Amit June 2, 2010

Hello,

How to install a Suphp on cpanel.

Reply

150 Walker June 4, 2010

Thanks :)
THIS helped me a lot.

Reply

151 m6mb3rtx June 4, 2010

Great article, very userfull tools!

Reply

152 dudhead June 5, 2010

Great list! Missed df command in the list.

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153 giftzy June 5, 2010

I become to love linux after 10 years of hp-ux

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154 Rafael Quirino de Castro June 7, 2010

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

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

Use tcmpdump and ngrep for packet sniffing

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

Reply

155 georges June 9, 2010

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

156 Naga June 13, 2010

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

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157 Jan 'luckyduck' Brinkmann June 15, 2010

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

- searching for network problems

- checking link status of ethernet connections
- and so on

Reply

158 Abdullah June 16, 2010

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

“bonus” means extra goodies :)

Reply

159 dust June 23, 2010

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

Reply

160 Jerome Christopher July 6, 2010

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

Jerome.

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161 sriharikanth July 12, 2010

Thanks, very useful information provided.

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162 Jyoti July 13, 2010

very useful

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163 t.k. July 16, 2010

Good compilation of commands. Thanks!

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164 Thomas August 3, 2010

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

Reply

165 Zanil Hyder August 4, 2010

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.

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166 brownman August 20, 2010

web-based gui : webmin wins them all

Reply

167 chandra August 28, 2010

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

Thanks a lot…………………..

Regards
Amuri Chandra

Reply

168 George August 30, 2010

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

Reply

169 SHREESAI LUG September 4, 2010

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

THANKS
VIVEK SIR
PLZ REPLY US ON MAIL
Reply
170 Tunitorios September 12, 2010

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

171 Marcelo Cosentino April 7, 2011

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

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172 mark seger September 12, 2010

I don’t believe that ftp usage by user is recorded anywhere, so you’d have to get inventive. The way I would do it is use collectl to show both processes sorted by I/O
and ftp stats. Then is simply becomes a matter of see which processes are contributing to the I/O and who their owners are.
-mark

Reply

173 jan February 24, 2011

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

Reply

174 sriram September 12, 2010

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

Reply

175 Riadh Rezig September 12, 2010

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.

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176 eaman September 14, 2010

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

Reply

177 Amzath September 14, 2010

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

178 Rafiq September 20, 2010

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

179 Jalal Hajigholamali September 20, 2010

Hi,
 use “rsync” command..

Reply

180 leebert September 28, 2010

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

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

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

Reply

181 Lonu Feruz September 29, 2010

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

182 nagaraju October 1, 2010

IT IS SUPERB LIST

Reply

183 MAHENDRA SINGH October 2, 2010

thanx
your collection is fantastic.

now i want to know that, how linux works

Reply

184 Rino Rondan October 7, 2010

Thanx !!!

A really completed guide !

Reply

185 games October 8, 2010

thank you so much it’s very usefull for me

Reply

186 sameer October 15, 2010

ThanX..!!

can u send basic linux commands with ex

Thanks again

Reply

187 Gunjan October 17, 2010

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

Reply

188 Moe October 19, 2010

another good tool for monitoring traffic and network usage:

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

Reply

189 Stan April 21, 2011

Nice history stats.

Reply

190 vishal sapkal October 19, 2010

 very nice
very importan tool of monetering
thanks for ……………………………………….

Reply

191 david a. lawson October 22, 2010

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

192 ram November 12, 2010

well,there are so good,i love them!

Reply

193 Rajkapoor M November 30, 2010

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

Reply

194 jalexandre December 2, 2010

Perl?!

Reply

195 jalexandre December 2, 2010

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

196 Sarath Babu M December 11, 2010

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

197 Laxman December 23, 2010

Very interesting I will try

I hope it’ll help for me

Reply

198 sah December 23, 2010

thanks alot … its a great help~!

Reply

199 KK December 25, 2010

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

Way to go Sumo

Reply

200 Deepak January 6, 2011

Thanks …. This is really helpful….

Reply

201 mark January 7, 2011

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

Reply
202 nigratruo January 13, 2011
 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

203 coldslushy February 7, 2011

Colors? Too resource intensive…

Reply

204 josh July 19, 2011

Colors do not always contrast well with the background.

Reply

205 abdul hameed February 2, 2011

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

206 Vimal February 9, 2011

Shit, this looks great! Thanks very much.

Reply

207 Michael February 10, 2011

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

Arghh! Linux is turning into Windows!

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

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

Reply

208 benjamin ngobi February 15, 2011

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

Reply

209 Mousin February 16, 2011

Awesome Thanks a ton worth a bookmark..

Reply

210 krishna February 23, 2011

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

211 krishna March 4, 2011

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

212 vasu April 16, 2011

1) lshw

3) w user

Reply

213 ysha March 4, 2011

thanks.. i love it

Reply

214 Rohit Shrivastava March 10, 2011

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

Reply

215 ctian March 11, 2011

nice one. it really works for a newby like me

Reply

216 Michael March 17, 2011

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

Reply

217 PRADEEP March 28, 2011

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

Plz help….

Reply

218 John April 5, 2011

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

nload eth0 should show rest.

Reply
219 Parthyz April 12, 2011
 Great Work man.. thanks a lot..

Reply

220 Matias April 12, 2011

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

Reply

221 sasidaran April 15, 2011

Good collection of commands.

Reply

222 TiTiMan April 15, 2011

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

223 vasu April 16, 2011

top

Reply

224 Sachin Jain April 18, 2011

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

225 chandu May 6, 2011

Plz help me how write the firewall rules in linux.

Reply

226 Jalal Hajigholamali May 6, 2011

Hi,

see manual page of iptables and get examples from google

Reply

227 sudipta June 3, 2011

GR8 effort … Worth 2 b appreciated

Reply

228 Liunx June 10, 2011

That’s great!
thanks very much.

Reply

229 foster June 16, 2011

Nagios fork Icinga should be on people’s radar as well.

https://www.icinga.org/

Reply

230 Jalaluddin June 24, 2011

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

231 Adil Husain June 30, 2011

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

Reply

232 Bhanu Kashyap July 9, 2011

Its Very Useful For Us….

Thanks….!!

Reply

233 Raivis July 12, 2011

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

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

Reply

234 Aviv.A July 14, 2011

You forgot the command “htop” :D

Reply

235 Laurens July 15, 2011

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

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

Reply

236 Sravi Raj July 19, 2011

Nice List

Reply

237 andy July 21, 2011

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

Reply

238 Tommie September 11, 2011

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

htop missing? :)

Reply

239 Vivek Gite September 11, 2011

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

Reply

240 GEORGE FAREED July 25, 2011

thaaaaaaaaaaaanks alot :)
its useful informations :)

Reply

241 apparao August 3, 2011

Thanks

Reply

242 kiran.somidi August 3, 2011

traceroute

Reply
243 kiran.somidi August 3, 2011

tarceroute coomand is not their

Reply

244 Lalit Sharma August 7, 2011

how can i copy all this?

Reply

245 amit lamba August 29, 2011

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

Reply

246 Daniel Brasil August 30, 2011

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

Reply

247 greg January 6, 2012

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

248 jock September 6, 2011

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

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

Reply

249 greg January 6, 2012

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

250 eeb2 September 7, 2011

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

Reply

251 khupcom September 12, 2011

I’m using monitorix and vnstat to monitor my servers

Reply

252 Gaurav kuamr jha October 2, 2011

Great it was bagger description for me.

This is article has solved my lot of problems
thanks for this
gkjha009

Reply

253 [email protected] October 8, 2011

thanks :)

Reply

254 Peter Green October 15, 2011

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
255 cirrus October 21, 2011

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

Reply

256 David Bothwell November 3, 2011

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

Reply

257 Ferenc Varga November 4, 2011

for http traffic, i suggest to use justniffer.

Reply

258 bishow November 8, 2011

yeah really nice post !!!

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

regards,

Reply

259 Unni November 11, 2011

Well written , keep up the good work ..

….
Thanks,
Unni

Reply

260 Gmaster December 2, 2011

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

Reply

261 Denis December 9, 2011

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

Reply

262 manna December 12, 2011

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

Reply

263 Sibbala Govardhan Raju December 13, 2011

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

264 Kash January 15, 2012

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

Reply

265 bhaskar February 6, 2012

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

Could you please suggest any to me.

Thanks,
 Reply

266 Steve February 13, 2012

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

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Tagged as: bandwidth monitoring tool linux, cpu monitoring linux, disk monitoring linux, htop command, load monitoring linux, monitoring linux servers, nagios monitoring linux, netstat command,
network monitoring linux, pgrep command, process monitoring linux, ps command, ss command, top command

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