About Monitoring Performance

While your computer is running, counters in the operating system are incremented to keep track of various system activities. System activities that are tracked are:

• Central processing unit (CPU) utilization

• Buffer usage

• Disk and tape input/output (I/O) activity

• Terminal device activity

• System call activity

• Context switching

• File access

• Queue activity

• Kernel tables

• Interprocess communication

• Paging

• Free memory and swap space

• Kernel Memory Allocation (KMA)

Monitoring Tools

The Solaris software provides several tools to help you keep track of how your system is performing. These include:

Table 34-4 Performance Monitoring Tools

The ...	Enable(s) You To ...	For More Information, See ...
sar and sadc utilities	Collect and report on system activity data	Chapter 36, Monitoring Performance (Tasks)
ps and prstat commands	Display information about active processes	Chapter 35, Managing Processes (Tasks)
vmstat and iostat commands	Summarize system activity data, such as virtual memory statistics, disk usage, and CPU activity	Chapter 36, Monitoring Performance (Tasks)
swap command	Display information about available swap space on your system	"Configuring Additional Swap Space (Tasks)" in System Administration Guide, Volume 1
netstat and nfsstat commands	Display information about network performance
Sun Enterprise SyMON	Collect system activity data on Sun's EnterpriseTM level systems	Sun Enterprise SyMON 2.0.1 Software User's Guide