Linux Magazine: Peeking In, At Linux

“Last month’s ‘Tech Support’ showed how to monitor resource
utilization with Cacti. This month, let’s use vmstat to track down
any bottlenecks that Cacti might have found. Part of the procps
package (which contains many other useful utilities such as ps,
top, w, and kill), vmstat reports statistical information about
process status, memory consumption, paging activity, block I/O
operations, interrupts, context switches, and processor usage.
vmstat is available from http://procps.sourceforge.net and is
licensed under the GPL. While you can download and install the
latest version of procps, it’s a standard set of utilities found in
almost every Linux install.

“A nice feature of vmstat is its overview of process, memory,
swap, I/O, system, and CPU activity in just one line of
numbers…”

Complete
Story