Using sar to Monitor Systems

The System Activity Reporter, also known as sar, is a comprehensive performance monitoring mechanism offered by Solaris. The sar program classifies system activity into distinct groups and provides information on each group. The groups sar monitors include the following:

  • Block device

  • Buffer activity

  • CPU run queue

  • CPU usage statistics

  • File access

  • Kernel memory allocation

  • Message and semaphores

  • Paging in activity

  • Paging out

  • System call

  • System swapping

  • System tables

  • TTY device

  • Unused memory and disk pages

Before delving into the sar command and its options, you need to configure the sar utility. If you run sar without performing configuration steps, the following error is displayed:

 # sar –a sar: can't open /var/adm/sa No such file ...

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