Evaluating SarCheck 6.01 for Linux

Understanding what is happening with the innards of your PC running Linux is a must. Thankfully, there is a tool for the job in the Linux arena.

One of the great things about the Linux operating system is that it has a tool for practically everything. Anything you want to know can be ascertained as long as you have the talent to memorize some arcane commands and understand how to pipe them together while selectively cutting and pasting from multiple sets of output. Linux vendors try to make their high-end offerings stand out from other implementations by adding all-in-one administration tools that reduce complex actions to a few point-and-click operations. Those vendors, however, are missing a very important operation – system analysis and recommendations based on usage, load, and related variables. That is where SarCheck comes in.

Advertised as “an inexpensive tool …that helps system administrators with Linux and UNIX performance tuning,” it is does more than that might at first imply. Yes, it takes the output from a number of utilities (ps, sar, and the /proc information, among others) and puts them into a single HTML report, but that report is unlike most you are probably used to seeing in that it is written in a straightforward language that is easily understandable (there goes job security). There are a few spelling errors (“ahow” instead of “show”) in the report and documentation, but nothing that can’t be easily understood at first glance.

The report is generated from the output of these commands over the course of the day (cron entries do the dirty work) and is divided into three key categories: Resource Analysis, Capacity Planning, and Summary of Statistics. The following sections look at each of these categories and give examples from a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 system. [Read the rest]

[tags]linux,unix,linux vendors,sarcheck[/tags]