Introduction
Most of the software deployments I have worked on are using Linux servers. When running software on Linux, it’s important to have an understanding on various tools available to check how the system behaves.
There are many Linux commands available to analyze the performance of a server. This article focuses on the tools available to observe the system activity. There are tools to measure activity in various components of the system, such as Operating System, CPU, Memory, I/O etc. Brendan Gregg, who is a computer performance analyst, calls these tools as “Linux Performance Observability Tools”.
Most of these tools are safe to run without any additional overhead on the system. See following diagram by Brendan Gregg about “Linux Performance Observability Tools”. Brendan has categorized these tools as follows: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced