[ale] Collectl and other peformance tools

[Brian Pitts]

On 10/07/2010 05:44 PM, Brian Pitts wrote:
> Atop will change your life.
> 
> https://lwn.net/Articles/387202/
> 

Sorry for the top post earlier, I'm not used to sending email from my
phone. I wanted to take a minute to follow up and further tout the
virtues of atop.

When your performance monitoring system (be it collectd, xymon, opennms,
or whatever) tells you there's a problem with a server, atop is what you
want to use when you log in to find the problem. It has completely
displaced my use of the sysstat suite of tools. It presents all the
information you could get from sar and pidstat from within the friendly
interface of top. You can view cpu, memory, i/o, and network statistics
at the system and per-process level. You can do this in real time or you
can step through samples recorded earlier. The next time a user
complains about how things were "slow" the day before, you'll be able to
go back and pinpoint exactly what was happening. Although the
interactive interface is what really shines, if you still need sar style
reports there's atopsar.

The lwn article I linked to earlier is a great overview of what you can
do with atop. For a more limited but in depth example of using atop this
paper [0] is good. It's also worth reading because the beginning is a
good refresher on virtual memory and the end presents a good use case
for cgroups.

[0] http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts