About Monitoring System Performance
While your computer is running, counters in the operating system are incremented to track
various system activities.
System activities that are tracked are as follows:
Central processing unit (CPU) utilization
Buffer usage
Disk and tape input/output (I/O) activity
Terminal device activity
System call activity
Context switching
File access
Queue activity
Kernel tables
Interprocess communication
Paging
Free memory and swap space
Kernel memory allocation (KMA)
Monitoring Tools
The Solaris software provides several tools to help you track how your system
is performing. The following table describes these tools.
Table 11-3 Performance Monitoring Tools
Command |
Description |
For More Information |
|---|
cpustat and
cputrack commands |
Monitors performance of a system or a process using CPU performance counters. |
cpustat(1M)
and cputrack(1) |
netstat and nfsstat commands |
Displays information about network performance |
netstat(1M) and nfsstat(1M) |
ps and
prstat commands |
Displays information about active processes |
Chapter 12, Managing System Processes (Tasks) |
sar and sadc commands |
Collects and reports on
system activity data |
Chapter 13, Monitoring System Performance (Tasks) |
Sun Enterprise SyMON |
Collects system activity data on Sun's enterprise-level systems |
Sun Enterprise SyMON 2.0.1 Software User's Guide |
swap
command |
Displays information about available swap space on your system |
Chapter 21, Configuring Additional Swap Space (Tasks), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems |
vmstat and iostat commands |
Summarizes
system activity data, such as virtual memory statistics, disk usage, and CPU activity |
Chapter 13, Monitoring System Performance (Tasks) |
cputrack
and cpustat commands |
Assists in accessing hardware performance counter facilities provided by microprocessors |
cputrack(1) and
cpustat(1M) man pages |
kstat and mpstat commands |
Examines the available kernel statistics, or
kstats, on the system and reports those statistics which match the criteria
specified on the command line. The mpstat command reports processor statistics in
tabular form. |
kstat(1M) and mpstat(1M) man pages. |
