Monitoring your Linux server

As I stated a post ago I am not very familiair with the Linux operating system. I know some basic commands to browse the system and to perform some filesystem actions. Most of the time that is sufficient. Usually I do the development of the software on a Windows workstation and then deploy it to a J2EE container running on some version/distribution of Linux. However this time I had to perform some performance tests on our applications while it was running at a (virtual) Linux server (RedHat 4 distribution, to be more specific). Usually I am able to find someone else to do the Linux thing :-) but this time I had to do it myself. Luckily there was my great friend Google that helped me in this matter! I quickly found out there is a ‘sar‘ command in Linux which will log all kinds of parameters about the system resources in a daily log file. And you can also use this command to create reports of the collected data. Although that was what I needed, what I really wanted was ‘ksar‘. This is a Java tool that you can run on your Windows machine (it’s Java so you can run it anywhere, right?) and have it creating graphs based on the ‘sar’ output. You should really check it out if you’re interested in the use of the resources on a Linux system. Here you see the tool at work: