Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Monitoring the System

Monitoring the system is one of the key responsibilities of a system administrator. You need to make sure that everything is as it should be on the system, or yell at people, call the cops, order a new hard drive, or whatever else is required. On a single-user system, there’s really not much to do, but on a larger system with many users, monitoring is a significant part of a system administrator’s job.

Among other things, you can monitor the system logs (located in /var/log), the users logged in, and the overall system load.

To Monitor Logs:

• sudo tail -1000 /var/log/messages → | more

  Use sudo to gain root access and look at the end (last 1, 000 lines) of the messages log file. The output of tail is piped to more so you ...