20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - NixCraft

10/29/2014
20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft
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20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every

SysAdmin Should Know
by nixCraft on June 27, 2009 344 comments LAST UPDATED January 1, 2014
in CentOS, Debian Linux, fedora linux
Need 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.
2.
3.
4.
Finding out bottlenecks.

Disk (storage) bottlenecks.
CPU and memory bottlenecks.
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.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html
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Fig.01: Linux top command
Commonly Used Hot Keys

The top command provides several useful hot keys:
Hot
Key
t
m
A
f
o
r
k
z
Usage
Displays summary information off and on.
Displays memory information off and on.
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
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0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2540988
2540988
2540956
2540956
2540940
2538444
2490060
522188
522188
522188
522188
522188
522188
522188
5130400
5130400
5130400
5130500
5130512
5130588
5130640
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
32
720
0
6
536
0
18
4
2
1199 665
1151 1569
1117 439
1189 932
1187 1417
1253 1123
4
1
4
1
1
4
5
1
0
1
0
0
1
1
96
99
95
99
98
96
94
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
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
1 ?
TIME CMD
00:00:02 init
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2
3
4
5
6
....
.....
4881
4885
4886
4887
4888
4891
4892
4893
12853
12854
14231
14232
54981
55465
55546
55704
?
?
?
?
?
00:00:02
00:00:01
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:15
migration/0
ksoftirqd/0
watchdog/0
migration/1
ksoftirqd/1
?
tty1
tty2
tty3
tty4
tty5
tty6
ttyS1
?
?
?
?
pts/0
?
?
pts/1
00:53:28
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:10:34
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
00:00:00
java
mingetty
mingetty
mingetty
mingetty
mingetty
mingetty
agetty
cifsoplockd
cifsdnotifyd
lighttpd
php-cgi
vim
php-cgi
bind9-snmp-stat
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

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# 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:
12302896
-/+ buffers/cache:
Swap:
1052248
used
9739664
4061800
0
free
2563232
8241096
1052248
shared
0
buffers
523124
cached
5154740
=> Related: :
1. Linux Find Out Virtual Memory PAGESIZE
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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
sda
22.04
31.88
512.03
16193351
sda1
0.00
0.00
0.00
2166
sda2
22.04
31.87
512.03
16189010
sda3
0.00
0.00
0.00
1615
Blk_wrtn
260102868
180
260102688
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:
06:45:12 PM
CPU
%user
%nice
%system
06:45:16 PM
all
2.00
0.00
0.22
06:45:20 PM
all
2.07
0.00
0.38
06:45:24 PM
all
0.94
0.00
0.28
06:45:28 PM
all
1.56
0.00
0.22
06:45:32 PM
all
3.53
0.00
0.25
Average:
all
2.02
0.00
0.27
06/26/2009
%iowait
%steal
0.00
0.00
0.03
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.03
0.00
0.01
0.00
%idle
97.78
97.52
98.78
98.22
96.19
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:
06:48:11 PM CPU
%user
%nice
%sys %iowait
06/26/2009
%irq
%soft %steal
%idle
intr/s
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06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
06:48:11
PM
PM
PM
PM
PM
PM
PM
PM
PM
all
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
3.50
3.44
3.10
4.16
3.77
2.96
3.26
4.00
3.30
0.09
0.08
0.08
0.11
0.11
0.07
0.08
0.10
0.11
0.34
0.31
0.32
0.36
0.38
0.29
0.28
0.34
0.39
0.03
0.02
0.09
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.03
0.01
0.03
0.01
0.00
0.02
0.00
0.01
0.02
0.01
0.00
0.01
0.17
0.12
0.11
0.11
0.24
0.10
0.10
0.13
0.46
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
95.86
96.04
96.28
95.25
95.46
96.52
96.23
95.42
95.69
1218.04
1000.31
34.93
0.00
44.80
25.91
14.98
3.75
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

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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
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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

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/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 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.
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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
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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.
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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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{ 344 comments read them below or add one }

1 VonSkippy June 27, 2009 at 5:10 am
Pretty much common knowledge (or should be) but handy to have listed all in one place.
Reply
2 Jim (JR) March 21, 2011 at 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)
13/71
10/29/2014
Reply
3 Steve August 3, 2011 at 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
4 Mike Williams August 15, 2011 at 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
5 farseas January 8, 2013 at 5:29 pm
If you did a lot of sysadmin you would already know the answer to that question.
Reply
6 robb June 27, 2009 at 8:29 am
yeap most of them are must-have tools.
good job of collecting them in a post.
Reply
7 Chris June 27, 2009 at 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
8 ftaurino June 27, 2009 at 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
9 James June 27, 2009 at 9:23 am
pocess or process. haha, i love typos
Reply
10 Sohrab Khan March 15, 2011 at 9:09 am
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10/29/2014
Dear i am learning the Linux pl z help me, I you have any useful notes pl z sent it to my Email.
Thanks
Reply
11 vasu March 21, 2011 at 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
12 darkdragn May 31, 2011 at 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
13 Artur June 27, 2009 at 9:40 am
What about Munin ? Lots easier and lighter than Cacti.
Reply
14 nig belamp December 7, 2010 at 4:21 pm
How can you even compare munin to cactistfu your a tool.
Reply
15 PC4N6 April 20, 2011 at 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
16 RB-211 May 13, 2011 at 12:57 pm
Wow, that was a bit harsh.
Reply
17 grammer nazi July 24, 2011 at 1:54 pm
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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
18 Jeff August 9, 2011 at 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
19 David August 25, 2011 at 3:05 pm
A ban? Censorship! You Nazi!
Reply
20 Roberto September 9, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Thats grammar, unless youre talking about the actor who plays Frasier on
Cheers. :P
Reply
21 Fireman October 17, 2011 at 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
22 flame on! December 4, 2011 at 8:05 pm
Vivek does a great job, as usual. But, thanks for the laughs, guys!
Reply
23 Raj June 27, 2009 at 10:13 am
Nice list, worth bookmarking!
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24 kaosmonk June 27, 2009 at 10:53 am
Once again, great article!!
Reply
25 Amr El-Sharnoby June 27, 2009 at 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
26 nixCraft June 27, 2009 at 1:01 pm
@Chris / James
Thanks for the heads-up!
Reply
27 Solaris June 27, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Great post, also great reference.
Reply
28 quba June 27, 2009 at 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
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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
29 Cristiano June 27, 2009 at 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
30 Peko June 27, 2009 at 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
31 paul tergeist June 27, 2009 at 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
32 harrywwc June 27, 2009 at 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
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.h
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33 StygianAgenda February 28, 2011 at 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
34 Lolcatz April 7, 2011 at 10:54 pm
Typos*
Reply
35 roflcopter June 24, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Typographical error*
Reply
36 Pdraig Brady June 27, 2009 at 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
37 Saad June 27, 2009 at 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
38 Jack June 28, 2009 at 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
39 StygianAgenda February 28, 2011 at 9:50 pm
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I just became an instant fan of whowatch. Thanks!!! ;)

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40 Ponzu June 28, 2009 at 2:28 am
vi tool used to examine and modify almost any configuration file.
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41 Manoj April 27, 2011 at 9:28 am
It is not a tool. It is an Editor
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42 su - July 28, 2011 at 9:30 pm
An editor is a tool for text documents.
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43 Eric schulman June 28, 2009 at 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.
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44 Ashok kumar June 28, 2009 at 5:48 am
hi gud information , keep it up
ash
Reply
45 Enzo June 28, 2009 at 6:09 am
You missed: iftop & nethogs
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46 Adrian Fita June 28, 2009 at 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.
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47 Knightsream June 28, 2009 at 8:53 am

Well, the one i use right now is Pandora FMS 3.0 and its making my work easy.
Reply
48 praveen k June 28, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I would like to add
whoami ,who am i, finger, pinky , id commands
Reply
49 create own website June 28, 2009 at 3:32 pm
i always love linux, great article
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50 Mathieu Desnoyers June 28, 2009 at 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 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
51 Andy Leo June 29, 2009 at 1:02 am
Very useful, well done. Thanks!
Reply
52 Aveek Sen June 29, 2009 at 1:29 am
Very informative.
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53 The Hulk June 29, 2009 at 2:11 am
I love this website.
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54 kburger June 29, 2009 at 3:08 am
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If were talking about a web server, apachetop is a nice tool to see Apaches activity.
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55 Ram June 29, 2009 at 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
56 Kartik Mistry June 29, 2009 at 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
57 nixCraft June 29, 2009 at 7:03 am
@Everyone
Thanks for sharing all your tools with us.
Reply
58 feilong June 29, 2009 at 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
59 boz June 29, 2009 at 10:21 am
mtr
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60 Scyldinga June 29, 2009 at 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?
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61 Ken McDonell June 29, 2009 at 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).
Reply
62 Lance June 30, 2009 at 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
63 bogo June 30, 2009 at 6:01 am
Very nice collection of linux applications. I work with linux but I cant say that i know them all.
Reply
64 MEHTA GHANSHYAM June 30, 2009 at 9:28 am
REALLY ITS VERY GOOD N USEFULL FOR ALL ADMIN.
THANKS ONCE AGAIN
Reply
65 fasil June 30, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Good postalready bookmarked cheers
Reply
66 Aleksey Tsalolikhin June 30, 2009 at 7:30 pm
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Ill just mention ngrep network grep.

Great list, thanks!!
Aleksey
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67 Abdul Kayyum July 1, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Thanks for sharing this information..
Reply
68 Aurelio July 1, 2009 at 8:20 pm
feilong, I agree. I use nmon on my linux boxes from years. Its worth a look.
Reply
69 komradebob July 1, 2009 at 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
Reply
70 pradeep July 2, 2009 at 11:14 am
how the hell i missed this site this many days :P thank god i found it :) i love it
Reply
71 Jay July 4, 2009 at 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
72 Manuel Fraga July 5, 2009 at 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.
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Reply
73 aR July 6, 2009 at 4:17 pm
thanks for sharing all the helpful tools.
Reply
74 Shailesh Mishra July 7, 2009 at 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
75 Bjarne Rasmussen July 7, 2009 at 8:00 pm
nmon is a nice tool try google for it, it rocks
Reply
76 Balaji July 12, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Very much Useful Informations,
trafmon is one more useful tool
Reply
77 Stefan July 15, 2009 at 8:18 pm
And for those which like lightweight and concise graphical metering:
xosview +disk -ints -bat
Reply
78 Raja July 19, 2009 at 3:03 am
Awesome. Especially love the ps tips. Very interesting
Reply
79 Rajat July 24, 2009 at 4:04 am
Thanks very good info!!!
Reply
80 nima0102 July 27, 2009 at 7:39 am
Its really nice :)
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Reply
81 David Thomas August 12, 2009 at 9:49 am
Excellent list!
Reply
82 Vinidog August 29, 2009 at 4:53 am
Nice very nice guy!!!! ;-)
Reply
83 Bob Marcan September 4, 2009 at 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
84 Tman September 5, 2009 at 8:48 pm
For professional network monitoring use Zenoss:
Zenoss Core (open source): http://www.zenoss.com/product/network-monitoring
Reply
85 Somnath Pal September 14, 2009 at 9:02 am
Hi,
Thanks for the nice collection with useful samples. Consider adding tools to monitor SAN storage,
multipath etc. also.
Best Regards,
Somnath
Reply
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86 Eddy September 17, 2009 at 8:41 am

I did not see ifconfig or iwconfig on the list
Reply
87 Kestev September 17, 2009 at 1:57 pm
openNMS
Reply
88 Sergiy September 25, 2009 at 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 :)
Reply
89 Mark Seger September 28, 2009 at 6:02 pm
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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90 PeteG September 29, 2009 at 5:33 am
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
91 Denilson October 26, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Use:
free -m
To show memory usage in megabytes, which is much more useful.

Reply
92 AndrewW November 5, 2009 at 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
93 Abhijit November 10, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Zabbix open source monitoring tool
http://www.zabbix.com
Reply
94 greg January 6, 2012 at 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).
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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
95 Kevin November 15, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Thanks, good work
Reply
96 Stefano November 22, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Just thanks! :)
Reply
97 GBonev November 25, 2009 at 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
98 Gokul December 7, 2009 at 4:43 am
How to install the Kickstart method in linux
Reply
99 Bilal Ahmad December 8, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Very nice collection.. Worth a bookmarkBravo
Reply
100 Jalal Hajigholamali December 9, 2009 at 5:07 am
Thanks a lot
Reply
101 mancai December 11, 2009 at 6:40 pm
nice sharing, this is what i want looking for few day ago tq
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102 aruinanjan December 14, 2009 at 7:41 am
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This is a nice document for new user, thaks to owner of this document.
arun
Reply
103 myghty December 16, 2009 at 7:57 am
Great post!! Thanks.
Reply
104 Rakib Hasan December 16, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Very helpful. Thanks a lot!
Reply
105 PRR December 22, 2009 at 9:25 pm
After so many thanks. Add one more..
thank you. Its very handy.
Reply
106 Yusuf December 25, 2009 at 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
107 Yusuf December 25, 2009 at 7:40 pm
I meant to thank Vivek Gita
once again awesome job
Reply
108 Shrik December 31, 2009 at 9:58 am
Thank you very much VERY GOOD WEBSITE
Reply
109 sekar January 1, 2010 at 4:16 pm
it is cool
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Reply
110 Giriraaj January 5, 2010 at 7:38 am
Thanks for sharing most resourceful information.
Reply
111 Bhagyesh Dhamecha January 6, 2010 at 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
112 Ganesan AS January 10, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Good info. Thanks for sharing.
May GOD bless you to do more.
Reply
113 Mark Seger January 10, 2010 at 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
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114 miles January 12, 2010 at 4:58 am
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Amr El-Sharnoby:
atop is awesome, thanks for the tip.
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115 Serg January 12, 2010 at 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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116 met00 January 12, 2010 at 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).
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117 Mark Seger January 12, 2010 at 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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118 mtituh Alu January 19, 2010 at 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
119 nixCraft January 19, 2010 at 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
120 kirankumarl February 3, 2010 at 9:26 am
Dear sir pls send me some linex pdf file by wich i can learn how to install & maintanes
Reply
121 Visigoth February 21, 2010 at 3:11 pm
I like the saidar tool, and iptstate. Check them out.
Reply
122 JK February 23, 2010 at 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
123 AD February 25, 2010 at 6:23 am
Thank you very much,,,.
This information is very useful for me to monitoring my server
Reply
124 Tarek February 26, 2010 at 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).
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125 deepu March 2, 2010 at 7:31 am

it is a very good and resourceful infomation.
Reply
126 Solo March 7, 2010 at 11:40 pm
OMG !
Amazing Super Ultra nice info . THX pinguins !
Reply
127 vijay March 12, 2010 at 7:30 am
its so usefulllll thanks a lot
Reply
128 Venu Yadav March 23, 2010 at 5:05 am
Good information. Thanks
Reply
129 Prashant Redkar March 25, 2010 at 7:10 am
Thank you it is very helpful
Reply
130 Saorabh Kumar March 25, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Good knowledge base, great post
Reply
131 Spyros March 30, 2010 at 2:52 am
Very interesting read that really includes the tools that every admin should know about.
Reply
132 amitabh mishra March 30, 2010 at 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
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133 Chinmaya April 2, 2010 at 4:48 am

Excellent one !!!
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134 saurav April 3, 2010 at 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
135 Mustafa Ashraf Rahman April 20, 2010 at 1:44 pm
hello Vivek Gite,
This is really a very good post and useful for all admin.
Thanks,
Ashraf
Reply
136 arief April 21, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Great tips..
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Thanks
Reply
137 Eduardo Cereto April 25, 2010 at 5:20 am
I think you missed my top 2 monitoring tools:
monit: http://mmonit.com/monit/
mrtg : http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
Reply
138 Lava Kafle April 29, 2010 at 9:05 am
Perfect examples : thanks
Reply
139 wolfc01 May 2, 2010 at 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
140 ohwell May 2, 2010 at 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
141 ravi May 3, 2010 at 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
142 Anonymous May 7, 2010 at 7:17 pm
but how to kill process ID in my server..
Reply
143 FHJ May 11, 2010 at 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
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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
144 someone May 10, 2010 at 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
145 kalyan de May 14, 2010 at 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
146 Samuel Egwoyi May 14, 2010 at 9:29 am
how can i practice Mysql using linux
Reply
147 Basil May 21, 2010 at 8:49 pm
This article simply rocks
Reply
148 Fenster June 1, 2010 at 10:24 am
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hey, thanks, just installed htop and iptraf, very nice tools!!
Reply
149 zim June 2, 2010 at 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
150 Boggles September 21, 2011 at 1:52 am
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
151 Amit June 2, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Hello,
How to install a Suphp on cpanel.
Reply
152 Walker June 4, 2010 at 4:19 am
Thanks :)
THIS helped me a lot.
Reply
153 m6mb3rtx June 4, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Great article, very userfull tools!
Reply
154 dudhead June 5, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Great list! Missed df command in the list.
Reply
155 giftzy June 5, 2010 at 6:26 pm
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I become to love linux after 10 years of hp-ux

Reply
156 Rafael Quirino de Castro June 7, 2010 at 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
157 georges June 9, 2010 at 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
158 Naga June 13, 2010 at 7:19 am
Is there any good tools for analyzing Apache/Tomcat instances.
Reply
159 Jan 'luckyduck' Brinkmann June 15, 2010 at 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
160 Abdullah June 16, 2010 at 7:15 am
nice list, at the end i think what you meant is Bonus and not bounce
bounce means jump
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bonus means extra goodies :)

Reply
161 dust June 23, 2010 at 8:19 am
What is in Linux that is equal to cfgadm in Solaris?
Reply
162 Jerome Christopher July 6, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Thanks for the excellent list of commands, links and info.
Jerome.
Reply
163 sriharikanth July 12, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Thanks, very useful information provided.
Reply
164 Jyoti July 13, 2010 at 9:57 am
very useful
Reply
165 t.k. July 16, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Good compilation of commands. Thanks!
Reply
166 Thomas August 3, 2010 at 5:40 pm
If you want graphy easly your performance data, try BrainyPDM: an another open source tool!
http://www.brainypdm.org
Reply
167 Zanil Hyder August 4, 2010 at 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
168 brownman August 20, 2010 at 8:57 am
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web-based gui : webmin wins them all

Reply
169 chandra August 28, 2010 at 7:39 am
Hi ite really very very nice which is helful to fresher.
Thanks a lot..
Regards
Amuri Chandra
Reply
170 George August 30, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Great resourceReally helpful for a novice as well for an expert
Reply
171 SHREESAI LUG September 4, 2010 at 5:36 am
hiiiiiiiiiiiii
we r SHREESAI LINUX USER GROUP FRM MUMBAI
THIS COMMANDS R REALLY NICE
THANKS
VIVEK SIR
PLZ REPLY US ON MAIL
Reply
172 Tunitorios September 12, 2010 at 2:31 am
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
173 Marcelo Cosentino April 7, 2011 at 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
174 mark seger September 12, 2010 at 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.
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-mark
Reply
175 jan February 24, 2011 at 7:42 am
Usually ftp access are recorded in /var/log/messages file (at least pure-ftpd)
Reply
176 sriram September 12, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Dumpcap is another command which is useful for capturing packets. Very useful tool
Reply
177 Riadh Rezig September 12, 2010 at 1:12 pm
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
178 eaman September 14, 2010 at 6:03 am
discus is a nice / light tool to have an idea of file system usage.
Reply
179 Amzath September 14, 2010 at 9:43 pm
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
180 Rafiq September 20, 2010 at 11:45 am
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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
181 Jalal Hajigholamali September 20, 2010 at 11:54 am
Hi,
use rsync command..
Reply
182 leebert September 28, 2010 at 8:58 pm
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 (blktraceblkiomon / 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
183 Lonu Feruz September 29, 2010 at 8:37 am
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
184 nagaraju October 1, 2010 at 4:47 am
IT IS SUPERB LIST
Reply
185 MAHENDRA SINGH October 2, 2010 at 12:09 pm
thanx
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your collection is fantastic.

now i want to know that, how linux works
Reply
186 Rino Rondan October 7, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Thanx !!!
A really completed guide !
Reply
187 games October 8, 2010 at 1:43 am
thank you so much its very usefull for me
Reply
188 sameer October 15, 2010 at 6:14 am
ThanX..!!
can u send basic linux commands with ex
Thanks again
Reply
189 Gunjan October 17, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Nice post, its really useful and helping beginners to resolve server issue
Reply
190 Moe October 19, 2010 at 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
191 Stan April 21, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Nice history stats.
Reply
192 vishal sapkal October 19, 2010 at 2:54 pm
very nice
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very importan tool of monetering

thanks for .
Reply
193 david a. lawson October 22, 2010 at 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
194 ram November 12, 2010 at 8:55 am
well,there are so good,i love them!
Reply
195 Nik November 15, 2010 at 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
196 Rajkapoor M November 30, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Hi,
Its awasome..thanks to builder..
Thanks&Regards,
Rajkapoor M
Reply
197 jalexandre December 2, 2010 at 12:41 am
Perl?!
Reply
198 jalexandre December 2, 2010 at 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
199 Sarath Babu M December 11, 2010 at 9:07 am
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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
200 Laxman December 23, 2010 at 9:37 am
Very interesting I will try
I hope itll help for me
Reply
201 sah December 23, 2010 at 10:19 pm
thanks alot its a great help~!
Reply
202 KK December 25, 2010 at 4:19 am
Sumo is the best, the best that ever was and the best that ever will be.
Way to go Sumo
Reply
203 Deepak January 6, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Thanks . This is really helpful.
Reply
204 mark January 7, 2011 at 7:05 am
How would I get a list of slow running websites on my server via ssh?
Reply
205 nigratruo January 13, 2011 at 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.
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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
206 coldslushy February 7, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Colors? Too resource intensive
Reply
207 josh July 19, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Colors do not always contrast well with the background.
Reply
208 abdul hameed February 2, 2011 at 6:52 am
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
209 Vimal February 9, 2011 at 8:02 pm
Shit, this looks great! Thanks very much.
Reply
210 Michael February 10, 2011 at 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)
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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
211 benjamin ngobi February 15, 2011 at 3:44 pm
wow these are great tools one should know.thank you so much coz it just makes me better every
day
Reply
212 Mousin February 16, 2011 at 9:52 am
Awesome Thanks a ton worth a bookmark..
Reply
213 krishna February 23, 2011 at 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
214 krishna March 4, 2011 at 1:08 pm
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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
215 vasu April 16, 2011 at 2:07 am
1) lshw
3) w user
Reply
216 Ryan Barrett March 1, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Thanks great post!
Reply
217 ysha March 4, 2011 at 5:06 am
thanks.. i love it
Reply
218 Rohit Shrivastava March 10, 2011 at 5:01 am
Very good for beginners as well as professional. Thank you very much Sir for sharing your
knowledge. I really appreciate.
Reply
219 ctian March 11, 2011 at 8:41 am
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nice one. it really works for a newby like me

Reply
220 Michael March 17, 2011 at 7:01 am
This is really helpful. I know these tools, but did not use them well. Many thanks for your tips.
Reply
221 PRADEEP March 28, 2011 at 4:33 am
I ve updated kernelnow i need to update it without restart the server.
Plz help.
Reply
222 John April 5, 2011 at 9:29 pm
cant see nload on the list , easy showing of whats going on with your network..
nload eth0 should show rest.
Reply
223 Parthyz April 12, 2011 at 6:30 am
Great Work man.. thanks a lot..
Reply
224 Matias April 12, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Nice list. I would add LogWatch, to send daily reports to your mail.
Reply
225 sasidaran April 15, 2011 at 5:16 am
Good collection of commands.
Reply
226 TiTiMan April 15, 2011 at 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
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and
Find Out top 10 CPU Consuming Process
Reply
227 vasu April 16, 2011 at 2:07 am
top
Reply
228 Me June 7, 2013 at 4:33 pm
Thanks for the typo correction; command works for me now.
Reply
229 Sachin Jain April 18, 2011 at 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
230 chandu May 6, 2011 at 3:06 am
Plz help me how write the firewall rules in linux.
Reply
231 Jalal Hajigholamali May 6, 2011 at 12:40 pm
Hi,
see manual page of iptables and get examples from google
Reply
232 cypherb0g May 6, 2011 at 7:56 pm
useful stuff!
Reply
233 sudipta June 3, 2011 at 4:58 am
GR8 effort Worth 2 b appreciated
Reply
234 Liunx June 10, 2011 at 7:56 am
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Thats great!
thanks very much.
Reply
235 foster June 16, 2011 at 11:13 pm
Nagios fork Icinga should be on peoples radar as well.
https://www.icinga.org/
Reply
236 Jalaluddin June 24, 2011 at 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
237 Adil Husain June 30, 2011 at 10:43 am
Nice list ill bookmark it for quick ref.
Reply
238 Bhanu Kashyap July 9, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Its Very Useful For Us.
Thanks.!!
Reply
239 Raivis July 12, 2011 at 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
240 Aviv.A July 14, 2011 at 10:30 pm
You forgot the command htop :D
Reply
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241 Laurens July 15, 2011 at 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
242 Sravi Raj July 19, 2011 at 5:03 am
Nice List
Reply
243 andy July 21, 2011 at 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
244 Tommie September 11, 2011 at 8:27 am
Nice Roundup. However, I love you not having a print function. I am able to print what I
need without it ;)
htop missing? :)
Reply
245 nixCraft September 11, 2011 at 12:21 pm
To see a print version just append /print to the end of the url.
Reply
246 GEORGE FAREED July 25, 2011 at 8:43 pm
thaaaaaaaaaaaanks alot :)
its useful informations :)
Reply
247 apparao August 3, 2011 at 11:36 am
Thanks
Reply
248 kiran.somidi August 3, 2011 at 12:47 pm
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traceroute
Reply
249 kiran.somidi August 3, 2011 at 12:49 pm
tarceroute coomand is not their
Reply
250 Lalit Sharma August 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm
how can i copy all this?
Reply
251 amit lamba August 29, 2011 at 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
252 Daniel Brasil August 30, 2011 at 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
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
254 jock September 6, 2011 at 2:45 am
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
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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
256 eeb2 September 7, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Thanks for posting this list. Keep up the good posts!
Reply
257 khupcom September 12, 2011 at 8:30 am
Im using monitorix and vnstat to monitor my servers
Reply
258 Gaurav kuamr jha October 2, 2011 at 7:42 am
Great it was bagger description for me.
This is article has solved my lot of problems
thanks for this
gkjha009
Reply
259 x@y.com October 8, 2011 at 10:14 am
thanks :)
Reply
260 Peter Green October 15, 2011 at 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
261 cirrus October 21, 2011 at 10:44 am
great post cuz , very informative for recent nix converts PCLinuxOS#1
Reply
262 David Bothwell November 3, 2011 at 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.
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Reply
263 Ferenc Varga November 4, 2011 at 10:06 pm
for http traffic, i suggest to use justniffer.
Reply
264 bishow November 8, 2011 at 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
265 Unni November 11, 2011 at 1:39 am
Well written , keep up the good work ..
.
Thanks,
Unni
Reply
266 Gmaster December 2, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Great job in compiling all the utils in one nice post. Thank you very much!
Reply
267 Denis December 9, 2011 at 10:30 pm
Great stuff, nice to have it all in one place. :-)
Reply
268 manna December 12, 2011 at 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
269 Sibbala Govardhan Raju December 13, 2011 at 10:08 am
Dear Sir,
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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
270 Kash January 15, 2012 at 2:41 pm
This is monitoring article not backup article??? Search your question somewhere else.
Reply
271 bhaskar February 6, 2012 at 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
272 Steve February 13, 2012 at 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
273 AL February 24, 2012 at 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
274 sudhir menon March 21, 2012 at 7:10 am
nfsiostat is a great small command on linux
Reply
275 nishhhh March 22, 2012 at 2:15 pm
nice collection..referencing related articles are like feathers in the cap !!
appreciate it..thanks!
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Reply
276 naveen March 23, 2012 at 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
277 naveen March 23, 2012 at 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
278 LTJX August 2, 2012 at 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
279 Stan August 6, 2012 at 6:25 am
Have you tried MRTG to monitor your routers. More for just network
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http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
Reply
280 Eric April 6, 2012 at 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
281 sudarshan April 11, 2012 at 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
282 Prasad August 17, 2012 at 6:23 pm
Just do
# uname
for specific details do:
# uname help
Reply
283 Navneet April 21, 2012 at 10:34 am
Thanks Vivek,
For Posting this. It is very useful for Beginners as well.
Keep the Great work going on..
Reply
284 Shreyansh Modi May 2, 2012 at 6:04 pm
Great Share :)
After using a few of these commands I am feeling like I am an Linux Operations Engineer ;)
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Reply
285 Ravi May 9, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Great and useful information.
Thanks
Reply
286 Michael May 10, 2012 at 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
287 Omar Osorio June 5, 2012 at 8:27 pm
lshw -short
Reply
288 vvvv June 12, 2012 at 3:50 am
I Liked it too thank you)
Reply
289 oran00b June 16, 2012 at 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
290 darkfader July 3, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Learn to use sar well and youll never need to use iostat, vmstat, etc.
Reply
291 William G. Loughran July 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Excellent cant thank you enough.
Not sure what CIFS tools we were using not SAMBA
Reply
292 Vichuz July 12, 2012 at 2:17 am
Keep up the nice work.
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Reply
293 seema July 17, 2012 at 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
294 Sandeep July 17, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Its really useful .nice one..I liked it!!!
Reply
295 Praveen Reddy July 19, 2012 at 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
296 Chetan July 25, 2012 at 7:40 am
One of my fav network traffic monitoring tool is iftop
Reply
297 Don Saulo August 2, 2012 at 10:54 am
Good job, guys!
Thanks for share.
Reply
298 netman August 26, 2012 at 3:49 am
thanks for your good articles
Reply
299 balwant September 1, 2012 at 5:46 pm
very very nice..
Reply
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300 chinta October 1, 2012 at 3:01 pm

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

Reply
308 xuedi November 11, 2012 at 5:50 pm
I would replace top with htop, it extents top with a much nicer ncurses and lots of functions
Reply
309 Bill November 14, 2012 at 3:02 pm
Great list, Shekhar For File Activity etc, I use vigil and vlog client to create the logs
Reply
310 Vishal November 15, 2012 at 6:26 am
try one for tool to report network interfaces bandwith just like vmstat/iostat
# ifstat
Reply
311 Vishnuprasad November 25, 2012 at 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
312 Vishnuprasad November 25, 2012 at 3:43 pm
A better Server Management Software
http://www.webmin.com/
Cheers!
Reply
313 Konstantin November 28, 2012 at 3:02 am
Id also add monit utility, to monitor assorted services and perform actions 9such as restarting the
stopped service).
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Reply
314 jlarchev December 15, 2012 at 7:21 am
Hi all,
A nice monitoring tool were using for years :
http://sysusage.darold.net
Reply
315 pechalbata.com January 2, 2013 at 2:52 pm
Great tool! Thanks!
Reply
316 Uday Vallamsetty December 31, 2012 at 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
317 Lucy January 2, 2013 at 11:11 pm
Thank you for this great post is it very helpful for someone that is starting out.
Reply
318 peter January 11, 2013 at 5:04 am
very useful article..im a reader of both nixcraft and cyberciti.. well done
Reply
319 veera February 7, 2013 at 7:00 am
Very nice Thanks for the effort..
Reply
320 sinlir February 8, 2013 at 10:29 am
Very nice!
Reply
321 wanie February 12, 2013 at 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.
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Reply
322 Ankit Srivastava February 26, 2013 at 10:01 pm
You guys are awesome.
I love this website :)
Reply
323 Mayur April 19, 2013 at 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
324 chandan June 1, 2013 at 6:56 am
It helped me a lot.
Thanks a lot and even more.
Reply
325 Shreehari June 4, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Its really awesome!!
Reply
326 mohsin June 6, 2013 at 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
327 nickchacha June 8, 2013 at 11:38 am
This are very helpful tips. Thank you chief.
Am a newbie in SysAdmin and i this commands will come in hardy.
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Reply
328 Kristoffer June 14, 2013 at 3:43 pm
Dont forget cowsay!
Reply
329 Thusitha Nuwan July 1, 2013 at 4:28 am
Thanks very much for this list.
It was very useful.
Reply
330 Lukey July 20, 2013 at 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
331 jasoncabahug July 22, 2013 at 5:26 am
thankz for this tips it was very useful
to me.. get more updates about open source..=)
Reply
332 BinaryTides July 28, 2013 at 4:08 am
Thanks, the list is very useful
Reply
333 Rajkumar kathane September 26, 2013 at 5:08 am
hi
thank u for sharing ur knowledge very useful.
Reply
334 erm3nda September 27, 2013 at 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.
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Reply
335 vikas October 28, 2013 at 1:28 pm
great help thanks a ton
Reply
336 dk November 5, 2013 at 4:25 am
kindly share some usefull linux commands and configuration setup
Reply
337 Ramesh December 2, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Excellent Article
Reply
338 Piyush Dangodra January 7, 2014 at 3:29 am
Excellent Post keep up the good work : )
Reply
339 maltris January 11, 2014 at 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
340 Mahesh Vakharia March 7, 2014 at 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
341 tungdt March 22, 2014 at 2:52 pm
Very useful article.thanks
Reply
342 Wellington Torrejais da Silva June 24, 2014 at 7:31 pm
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10/29/2014
Thanks!!!
Reply
343 Dev jha September 22, 2014 at 11:43 am
wow.its cooooool
thank you very much.
Reply
344 Vakharia Mahesh September 25, 2014 at 3:34 pm
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
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20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every

Finding out bottlenecks.

#1: top - Process Activity Command

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

Fig.01: Linux top command

Commonly Used Hot Keys

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

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

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

Display Memory Utilization Slabinfo

Get Information About Active / Inactive Memory Pages

load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

#5: ps - Displays The Processes

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

ps is just like top but provides more information.

Show Long Format Output

To See Threads ( LWP and NLWP)

To See Threads After Processes

Print All Process On The Server

Print A Process Tree

Print Security Information

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

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

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

2. Linux Limit CPU Usage Per Process

#7: iostat - Average CPU Load, Disk Activity

=> 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:

#9: mpstat - Multiprocessor Usage

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

#10: pmap - Process Memory Usage

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

The last line is very important:

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

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

#13: iptraf - Real-time Network Statistics

Fig.02: General interface statistics: IP traffic statistics by network interface

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

Fig.03 Network traffic statistics by TCP connection

#14: tcpdump - Detailed Network Traffic Analysis

To display all FTP session to 202.54.1.5, enter:

To display all HTTP session to 192.168.1.5:

Use wireshark to view detailed information about files, enter:

#15: strace - System Calls

#16: /Proc file system - Various Kernel Statistics

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

17#: Nagios - Server And Network Monitoring

18#: Cacti - Web-based Monitoring Tool

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

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

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

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

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know - nixCraft

Fig.06 The Gnome System Monitor application