SYSSTAT Howto: A Deployment and Configuration Guide for Linux Servers

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"The four main components used in collection activities are sar, sa1, sa2 and cron. Sar is the system activity reporter. This tool will display interpreted results from the collected data. Sar is ran interactively by an administrator via command line. When a sar file is created, it is written into the /var/log/sa directory and named sar##. The ## is a numerical value that represents the day of the month (i.e. sa03 would be the third day of the month). The numerical value changes accordingly without system administrator intervention. There are many option flags to choose from to display data in a sar file to view information about server operations, such as cpu, network activity, NFS and sockets. These options can be viewed by reviewing the man pages of sar.

"Sa1 is the internal mechanism that performs the actual statistical collection and writes the data to a binary file at specified times. Information is culled from the /proc directory where the Linux kernel writes and maintains pertinent data while the operating system is running. Similar to sar, the binary file is written into /var/log/sa and named sa##. Again, the ## represents the day of the month (i.e. sar03 would be the third day of the month). Once more, the numerical value changes accordingly without system administrator intervention."

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