Unix Server Performance Monitoring and Analysis Tools

Unix performance monitoring can help you keep track of the various elements of your system and hardware with an impact on the performance of your Unix operating system.

Unix system monitoring involves tracking system resources tied to your Unix servers for any specific changes or states indicative of a problem with your Unix performance. This goes beyond helping IT administrators catch issues before end users feel their impact. Monitoring can also allow for better Unix performance tuning, so administrators can improve Unix efficiency and, in turn, end user experience.

While there are many system and hardware elements you need to track as part of effective Unix server monitoring, they key resources to pay attention to include:

• Memory
• CPU
• Disk space
• Network time
• I/O time
• Communications lines
• Applications programs

Unix performance monitoring works by letting you regularly collect data on your Unix system resources. These collected metrics relate to both software and hardware performance. Effective monitoring can also help make sure you’re aware of any issues with an impact on your Unix performance at the first signs of trouble and ensure your Unix system is optimally performing.

IT administrators are typically in charge of Unix server monitoring. The process can be done manually or with the use of Unix performance monitoring tools that automate your monitoring efforts. To see your Unix performance manually, you often need to use a variety of commands to display the information you are searching for in your command-line interface. Some of the most common commands used to see Unix performance include:

• Netstat
• Time
• Uptime
• Ps
• Vmstat

When using Unix monitoring tools, performance metrics traditionally provided by using the command-line interface can automatically be monitored alongside other key performance data and displayed in a single dashboard. From this centralized dashboard, you gain a consolidated view of performance from across Unix systems and your environment to more easily prevent server performance issues.

With Unix performance analysis tools, you not only gain the benefit of metrics being collected and displayed automatically, you also get the added benefit of automated alerts. These alerts are designed to inform you whenever thresholds are crossed or when predetermined events occur, so you can feel confident you’ll be notified when your attention is needed.

Unix performance monitoring can help you maintain the performance of your Unix servers. Servers are the backbone of any organization or business, and when they’re not performing optimally, your end users may feel the impact, and productivity can suffer.

With Unix performance monitoring, you can better proactively identify and tackle issues as they occur—ideally before your end users even realize there’s a problem.

Beyond simply addressing problems, keeping tabs on your system metrics as part of your Unix monitoring efforts can help you optimize overall server performance. By showing you where a server or applications are inefficiently using resources, Unix monitoring can help you more easily identify opportunities to enhance performance beyond simple problem-solving. Unix performance tools can also go beyond collecting, consolidating, and organizing your Unix performance data for you. The best ones offer analysis tools to help you better understand what’s happening in your Unix system.

Unix performance monitoring tools are built to automatically collect and keep track of performance metrics from across a system to provide you with insight into Unix performance.

The tools can offer real-time tracking of the most vital statistics relating to Unix performance. These key metrics include CPU load, memory load, response time, disk queue, and network throughput. Importantly, this real-time tracking can give you visibility into potential issues and insights into errors before and as they occur.

Unix monitoring tools can go beyond those main metrics to offer you comprehensive Unix monitoring. These tools measure and identify which processes are consuming excess resources, so you can terminate processes remotely, including physical and virtual memory, CPU, and disk I/O. Unix monitoring tools can also give you insights into run queue, kernel threads, page cache, and more. Unix performance monitoring tools can also include intelligent alerting, so you can configure your alerting settings to make sure you’re informed when specific performance metrics exceed a preset threshold.

Another key component of a Unix monitoring tool is its analytics. Beyond simply providing you with real-time metrics, Unix monitoring tools should help you better understand what the metrics mean in the context of your Unix system. Since monitoring tools track your Unix performance metrics over time, they should also be able to provide you with deeper insights into any anomalies within your system.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is designed to offer comprehensive Unix monitoring and alerting capabilities to help ensure optimal Unix performance.

SAM can help you proactively identify and target performance issues by collecting metrics from across your Unix system including the ability to monitor Unix in HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris environments straight out of the box. With integrated intelligent alerting, SAM can to help you more quickly identify processes consuming too many resources.

SolarWinds SAM is built to go beyond simple Unix monitoring by providing deep visibility into metrics and help you more easily analyze metrics, so you better understand their significance. SAM’s intuitive dashboards also let you quickly see metrics on the critical components of your Unix server while allowing you to drill down into deeper detail on any metrics you want to know more about. If you want help understanding what the metrics displayed on your dashboard mean in your specific context, SAM has you covered with analysis tools that can provide reports to help you make sense of your Unix performance.