System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration
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About Monitoring System Performance

While your computer is running, counters in the operating system are incremented to track various system activities.

System activities that are tracked are as follows:

  • Central processing unit (CPU) utilization

  • Buffer usage

  • Disk and tape input/output (I/O) activity

  • Terminal device activity

  • System call activity

  • Context switching

  • File access

  • Queue activity

  • Kernel tables

  • Interprocess communication

  • Paging

  • Free memory and swap space

  • Kernel memory allocation (KMA)

Monitoring Tools

The Solaris software provides several tools to help you track how your system is performing. The following table describes these tools.

Table 11-3 Performance Monitoring Tools

Command

Description

For More Information

cpustat and cputrack commands

Monitors performance of a system or a process using CPU performance counters.

cpustat(1M) and cputrack(1)

netstat and nfsstat commands

Displays information about network performance

netstat(1M) and nfsstat(1M)

ps and prstat commands

Displays information about active processes

Chapter 12, Managing System Processes (Tasks)

sar and sadc commands

Collects and reports on system activity data

Chapter 13, Monitoring System Performance (Tasks)

Sun Enterprise SyMON

Collects system activity data on Sun's enterprise-level systems

Sun Enterprise SyMON 2.0.1 Software User's Guide

swap command

Displays information about available swap space on your system

Chapter 21, Configuring Additional Swap Space (Tasks), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems

vmstat and iostat commands

Summarizes system activity data, such as virtual memory statistics, disk usage, and CPU activity

Chapter 13, Monitoring System Performance (Tasks)

cputrack and cpustat commands

Assists in accessing hardware performance counter facilities provided by microprocessors

cputrack(1) and cpustat(1M) man pages

kstat and mpstat commands

Examines the available kernel statistics, or kstats, on the system and reports those statistics which match the criteria specified on the command line. The mpstat command reports processor statistics in tabular form.

kstat(1M) and mpstat(1M) man pages.

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