Monitoring CPU Utilization

The mpstat utility on Solaris can be used to monitor CPU utilization, especially with multi-threaded applications running on multiprocessor machines, which is a typical configuration for enterprise solutions.

The mpstat command reports processor statistics in tabular form. Each row of the table represents the activity of one processor. The first table summarizes all activity since boot. Each subsequent table summarizes activity for the preceding interval. All values are rates listed as events per second unless otherwise noted.

Use mpstat with an argument between 5 seconds to 10 seconds. An interval that is smaller than 5 or 10 seconds might be more difficult to analyze. A larger interval might provide a means of smoothing the data by removing spikes that could mislead the result.

Input

mpstat 10

Output

CPU minf mjf xcal intr ithr csw icsw migr smtx srw syscl usr sys wt idl
0 1 0 5529 442 302 419 166 12 196 0 775 95 5 0
0 1 1 0 220 237 100 383 161 41 95 0 450 96 4 0
0 4 0 0 27 192 100 178 94 38 44 0 100 99 1 0 0

What to Look For

The cpu utilization is the inverse of idle time. ie 0% idl means 100% cpu utilization.