Sysstat

sysstat is an open source and freely distributed software project that comprises of several command-line utilities for GNU/Linux operating systems, allowing you to collect and report system activity information. It is a Linux monitoring tool, designed for global system performance analysis.

Features at a glance

The software can monitor a big number of various metrics, allows users to configure the length of the stored data history, supports both SMP and UP machines, supports hotplug CPUs, calculates average statistics values over the sampling period, allows you to save statistics in a file, and automatically detects new devices that have been dynamically registered or created.

Additionally, the program supports SMP and UP machines, especially computers with multicore or hyperthreaded CPUs, supports tickless CPUs, allows users to export statistics to CSV, JSON, XML and any other popular file format, includes XML Schema and DTD documents, supports multiple languages, and it is compatible with applications that allow you to make graphs from sysstat's statistics.

What tools are included?

As mentioned, sysstat comprises of various command-line utilities, among which we can mention sar, mpstat, sadf, iostat, cifsiostat, nfsiostat, sadc and pidstat. All of these are accessible from the command-line interface and allow you to do certain tasks.

Under the hood, availability and supported OSes

The applications included in sysstat are written in the C programming language, which means that it requires very little CPU time to run. At the moment, is supports both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.

While it has been successfully tested on the Ubuntu, Debian and Arch Linux operating systems here at the Softoware Labs, sysstat is also compatible with any other GNU/Linux distribution that is in active development.

What is new in this release:

• sar: Fix possible crash happening when buffers needed to be reallocated to accomodate more devices.
• sar/sadf/mpstat: Compute global CPU statistics as the sum of individual CPU ones.
• mpstat: Compute statistics for node "all" as the sum of individual CPU statistics.
• sar: Add new "-z" option, which tells sar to omit output for any devices for which there was no activity during the sample period.
• sar/sadf: Now better take into account offline and online CPU when displaying softnet statistics.
• sadc: Shrink size of sadc binary file by compiling out unneeded functions.
• sadf: Change raw format output to be CSV compliant.
• sadf: Reorder some values displayed in debug mode/raw format.
• Add initial support for major numbers > 255.
• Update sysstat.ioconf devices list.
• mpstat: Remove option "-P ON". mpstat now displays only online CPU by default.
• sar and mpstat manual pages updated.
• pidstat: Report CPU usage for a process as the sum of all threads [11.6.3] [11.4.9].
• sar: Change condition used in workaround for CPU coming back online [11.6.3] [11.4.9].
• NLS updated: Various translations updated. .

What is new in version :

• sar/sadc: Added new metrics from /proc/meminfo to memory statistics.
• sadf: Update output formats to take into account new memory metrics.
• [Peter Schiffer]: Fixes from static analysis.
• [Peter Schiffer]: Prefer xz compression program when compressing sa data files [11.0.3].
• [Peter Schiffer]: Portable way to detect 64 bit OS in configure script [11.0.4].
• [Vasant Hegde]: sadc: Fix possible race condition in signal handler code [11.0.3].
• Fix description of %util in iostat and sar manual pages [11.0.3].
• Fix wrong size used in upgrade_magic_section() function.
• Add new sadc_options variable to configure script.
• Rename --disable-man-group option to --disable-file-attr. This configure's option prevents the build process from setting attributes of files being installed.
• Make sure that no crontabs are activated when configure's option --enable-copy-only is used [11.0.3].
• FAQ updated.
• RPM spec file updated.
• sar manual page updated.
• sadc manual page updated [11.0.3].
• CREDITS file updated.
• Code cleaned [11.0.3].

What is new in version 11.1.2:

• [Robert Elliott]: Added irqtop command. irqtop monitors differences in /proc/interrupts and /proc/softirqs per CPU, along with CPU statistics. irqtop is currently in the contrib directory.
• [Lance Shelton]: Added irqstat command, a better way to watch /proc/interrupts, designed for NUMA systems with many processors.
• [Vasant Hegde]: sadc: Don't send SIGINT signal if parent process is already dead [11.0.2].
• sadc: Make sure that functions used to count items (CPU, network interfaces, etc.) are called only once.
• sar and sadf now tell the user when they cannot read a file because the endian format doesn't match.
• Fixed incomplete sar and sadf output when end time (specified with option -e) crosses 24 hour boundary [11.0.2].
• cifsiostat/nfsiostat: Fix output on single core CPU [11.0.2].
• pidstat didn't handle processes with spaces in their name properly. This is now fixed [11.0.2].
• NLS updated.
• CREDITS file updated.

What is new in version 11.1.1:

• Added option -c to sadf: This option enables the user to convert an sa datafile with an old format (at least 9.1.6) to the up-to-date format (11.1.1 as of today).
• Update sadf -H output to print datafile date and tell whether this file has been converted from an old datafile or not.
• Added option -[0-9]+ to sadf to show data of that days ago [11.0.1].
• Use statvfs() system call instead of deprecated statfs() to get filesystems statistics with sar [11.0.1].
• sar: Stricter syntax check [11.0.1].
• Remove unneeded include file in sa_common.c [11.0.1].
• [Kosaki Motohiro]: Update workaround for 32bit CPU counters [11.0.1].
• Define unknown scheduling policies in pidstat.h [11.0.1].
• [Ivana Varekova]: Test return value for fgets/fscanf calls [11.0.1].
• Makefile updated: Follow symlinks when creating the tarballs [11.0.1].
• sadf manual page updated [11.0.1].

What is new in version 10.2.1:

• Added new --enable-copy-only option to configure script. This option may be useful when creating sysstat package to make sure that files are only copied to $DESTDIR and that no service is activated (eg. for distro using systemd).
• pidstat: Add a new metric to pidstat I/O statistics: per-task block I/O delays.
• Take $DESTDIR variable into account when installing sysstat service used by systemd.
• sadf -H, sadf -j and sadf -x now also display the file creation time.
• Use sizeof() instead of hardcoded size values.
• pidstat manual page updated.
• Cosmetic fixes.
• NLS updated.

What is new in version 10.2.0:

• A new option (-v) has been added to pidstat, enabling the user to display the number of threads and file descriptors associated with tasks.
• Several bugs have been fixed in pidstat.

What is new in version 10.1.7:

• A new metric has been added to sar network devices statistics, giving the utilization percentage of the network interface cards.
• Several bugs have been fixed all around.

What is new in version 10.1.6:

• The sar command can now display filesystems statistics (blocks and inodes utilization) with its new option "-F".
• Several (small) bugs have also been fixed.

What is new in version 10.1.5:

• mpstat now takes into account every interrupt per processor so that their number adds up to the number displayed for CPU "all".
• The systemd unit file could no longer be installed because a macro wasn't expanded in the configure script. This is now fixed.

What is new in version 10.1.4:

• sar, pidstat, and mpstat now stop and display their average statistics when they receive a SIGINT signal (crtl/c). pidstat now displays the task's UID for all tasks.
• The option -U has been added to pidstat; this option tells it to display the username of the task instead of its UID.
• When this option is followed by a user name, only tasks belonging to the specified user are displayed by pidstat.

What is new in version 10.1.3:

• Network and IPv4/IPv6 counters have changed to 64-bit format to keep in sync with recent kernels.
• A new option has been added to iostat to prevent it from displaying its first report with statistics since system boot.
• Several bugs have been fixed.

What is new in version 10.0.5:

• An interesting new feature has been added to iostat here: iostat can now display consolidated statistics for one or several groups of devices. This should prove useful for machines with lots of disks. Apart from that, this version includes some bug fixes for sadc and sadf, and a new translation file for Croatian people.

What is new in version 10.0.4:

• Virtual devices are no longer taken into account in sar -b results.
• iostat can now display target device information when a symbolic link is specified as a parameter.
• The option --disable-stripping has been added to the configure script.
• A Serbian translation has been added.

What is new in version 10.0.0:

• Several bugs have been fixed with the nfsiostat and cifsiostat commands.
• Sysstat's commands are no longer linked with the sensors library if it is not needed.
• iostat incorrectly mapped device-mapper IDs greater than 256: This is now fixed.
• NLS has been updated and an Ukrainian translation has been added.

What is new in version 9.1.7:

• New metrics for sar (amount of active and inactive memory, processes blocked waiting for I/O to complete)
• Various optimizations and improvements

What is new in version 9.1.6:

• New metrics have been added to sar and sadc: hugepages utilization statistics, and average CPU clock frequency.
• This version also includes bugfixes.

What is new in version 9.1.5:

• Voltage input statistics, together with some other metrics, have been added to sar's power management group of statistics.
• NLS has been updated.
• A Czech translation has been added.

What is new in version 9.1.4:

• New metrics have been added to the power management group of statistics in sar (patch from Jan Kaluza from Redhat). This version enables you to monitor fans speed and devices temperature. You will need the libsensors library (part of the lm_sensors project) installed for that.

What is new in version 9.1.3:

• Lots of new features in this release. Two new commands have been added (nfsiostat and cifsiostat) enabling the user to display I/O statistics for NFS and CIFS filesystems (courtesy Ivana Varekova from Redhat). Other improvements concern mainly pidstat: It's now possible to select tasks using a regular expression with option -C. A new option has also been added to pidstat to display stack statistics (patch by Mario Konrad).

What is new in version 9.1.1:

• More than 3 months have passed since the last sysstat release. After more than 10 years spent working on sysstat, I still certainly enjoy working on this project although a wife and two children have now made it a bit more difficult... Even if things go much more slowly now, I decided to start a new development series, so here is version 9.1.1, ready for you to test. See the release notes available from the download page. Note that from now on, sysstat will no longer support kernels older than 2.6. This enabled me to get rid of many lines of code...

What is new in version 9.0.5:

• Sysstat should now be able to pretty-print device names whose minor numbers are greater than or equal to 256.
• sadc manual page, NLS and FAQ have been updated.

What is new in version 9.0.3:

• [Michael Blakeley]: Option -z added to iostat. This option tells iostat to omit output for any devices for which there was no activity during the sample period.
• [Tomasz Pala]: Fix mpstat where interrupt values should be read as unsigned integers.
• sar -n ALL didn't select IPv6 statistics. This is now fixed.
• iostat, sar and mpstat manual pages updated.
• sadf -x now displays file creation date.
• XSD and DTD documents updated.
• NLS updated. Latvian translation added.
• CREDITS file updated.
• Code cleaned.

What is new in version 9.0.2:

• More bug fixes and improvements in this version: A memory corruption has been fixed in iostat and pidstat, where a segfault could happen when a list of comma-separated values following option -p was entered on the command line. With regard to improvements, sadc can now collect partition statistics in addition to disk ones. Go on testing, as I want sysstat 9.0.x to become rock solid...!

What is new in version 9.0.1:

• A crash with sar where a pointer was freed twice was fixed.
• NLS translations have been updated.

What is new in version 9.0.0:

• Power management statistics have been added to sar.
• This release no longer truncates the interval of time to 32 bits, as this may cause some problems when displaying average values statistics on machines with hundreds of CPUs.
• A small bug in sar where it didn't parse arguments properly when some options were entered in a specific order has been fixed.

What is new in version 8.1.8:

• Support was added for IPv6-related protocols. iostat now displays statistics for devices only (and not partitions) when its -d option is not used.
• Extended statistics are now available from iostat even for partitions with recent kernels.
• A bug was fixed where iostat was unable to read stats from sysfs for devices which had a slash in their names (e.g. /dev/cciss/c0d0).
• A bug was fixed in iostat where %CPU spent servicing hard and soft IRQ were counted twice.

What is new in version 8.1.7:

• Support for SNMP statistics has been added to sar.
• The option -l has been added to pidstat.
• This option enables the user to display the whole command line for each process.
• The option -h has been added to sar.
• This option displays a short help message.
• Some memory leaks detected by valgrind have been fixed.

What is new in version 8.1.6:

• The option -h has been added to pidstat.
• This option is used to display all activities horizontally on a single line.
• A bug has been fixed in pidstat: When pidstat was used to monitor a process and all its threads (with pidstat's option -t), it could display weird values if the thread group leader terminated. mpstat now displays stats for all interrupts, including NMI, LOC, etc.