sar: One small part of a larger suite

I’ll go ahead and throw sar out here today, even though it might be more appropriate to save it for its parent suite, sysstat.

 

sar is a system analysis report, and in a nutshell, spits out statistics for a system either periodically, or as collected over a longer period of time.

By itself sar is only marginally useful, as you can see above, but it does share some interesting data.

And the ability to poll over some time means you can collect data through a rough patch, such as loading WordPress.com’s big fat backend. 🙄

There are a lot of options for sar, but if you’re not using the entire suite, it might not be able to tell you much.

If you want a few quickshot examples of how to use it, take a look at this page. Again, without the entire suite working, only some will work right.

I’ll probably revisit this when sysstat comes around. To be continued. 😉