Appendix A Monitoring Tools

This appendix describes system utilities you can use to monitor your server environment. This appendix contains these sections:

General UNIX Tools

Table A-1 lists some general UNIX tools you can use to monitor your server environment. These tools are available on various UNIX platforms. For more information about these tools, see the man pages delivered with your UNIX system.

Table A-1 General UNIX Tools
Tool	Description
iostat	Provides information about disk I/O and CPU usage.
lsof	Provides information about open file descriptors. Available in source from: ftp://vic.cc.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix.
lslk	Provides information about file-system locks. Available in source from: ftp://vic.cc.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix
netstat	Provides statistics about network functions.
nslookup	Allows you to query DNS servers for information about hosts and domains; for example you can print a list of hosts in a particular domain; also provides an IP address-to-host name mapping function (and vice versa).
ping	Allows you to query the status of a remote host or network gateway.
sar	UNIX SysV performance monitoring tool. Useful for gathering system information over a longer period of time to use in long term planning, for example.
tcpdump	Public domain tools used in debugging and to monitor network traffic.
top	Provides quick, easy monitoring of processes and CPU activities. (This is a public domain tool that works on most UNIX platforms.)
trace	Similar to truss on Solaris systems. Sometimes included by the vendor; otherwise, you can download this tool from an Internet site.
traceroute	Determines the path a packet takes throughout the Internet to reach its final destination.
vmstat	Provides statistics about process, virtual memory, disk, trap, and CPU activity.

Solaris Operating System Tools

The following table shows the monitoring tools available for the Solaris Operating System.

Table A-2 Monitoring Tools for the Solaris Operating System
Tool	Description
lockstat	Provides information on OS and application locking. Available on Solaris 2.6 systems only.
mpstat	Provides statistics about each processor on the system
pmap	Provides breakdown on how much memory a process is using so you can see how much is shared and how much is private. (Located in /usr/proc/bin.)
proctool	Monitors processes and threads. (Available from the Sun web site.)
snoop	Monitors network traffic; indispensable when debugging low-level packets.
SymbEL/Virtual Adrian	A very powerful system monitoring toolkit. Provides the functionality of the above listed tools and more. Can be used to tune the ncsize and ufs_ninode parameters and even has a mode to tune the operating system automatically.
truss	Provides information about which system calls a process makes.