Showing System Activity

You can display formatted information about system activity with the sar command.

Prerequisites

To display system activity statistics, the sadc command must be running.

Note: The typical method of running the sadc command is to place an entry for the sa1 command in the root crontab file. The sa1 command is a shell-procedure variant of the sadc command designed to work with the cron daemon.

Procedure

To display basic system-activity information, enter:

sar 2 6

where the first number is the number of seconds between sampling intervals and the second number is the number of intervals to display. The output of this command would look something like this:

    arthurd 2 3 000166021000    05/28/92

14:03:40    %usr    %sys    %wio   %idle
14:03:42       4       9       0      88
14:03:43       1      10       0      89
14:03:44       1      11       0      88
14:03:45       1      11       0      88
14:03:46       3       9       0      88
14:03:47       2      10       0      88

Average        2      10       0      88

The sar command also offers a number of flags for displaying an extensive array of system statistics. To see all available statistics, use the -A flag. For a list of the available statistics and the flags for displaying them, see the sar command.

Note: To have a daily system activity report written to /var/adm/sa/sadd, include an entry in the root crontab file for the sa2 command. The sa2 command is a shell procedure variant for the sar command designed to work with the cron daemon.