System Activity Report (sar) is a

Unix System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

-derived

system monitor A system monitor is a hardware or software component used to monitor system resources and performance in a computer system. Among the management issues regarding use of system monitoring tools are resource usage and privacy. Overview Software ...

command used to report on various system loads, including

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

activity, memory/paging, interrupts, device load, network and swap space utilization. Sar uses / proc filesystem for gathering information.

Platform support

Sar was originally developed for Solaris operating system and it is available in Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, but it is not available for macOS or FreeBSD. Prior to 2013 there was a bsdsar tool, but it is now deprecated.

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

distributions, such as Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSe and Ubuntu provide sar utility through the sysstat package.

Syntax

sar flags -e time -f filename i sec -s time ; : filename Uses filename as the data source for sar. The default is the current daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd. ; : time Selects data up to time. The default is 18:00. ; : sec Selects data at intervals as close as possible to sec seconds.

Example

ser@localhost sar # Displays current CPU activity.

Sysstat package

Additional to sar command, Linux sysstat package in Debian, RedHat Enterprise Linux and SuSE provides additional reporting tools: * * * * * * * * *

References

*
Easy system monitoring with SAR (IBM developerWorks)System Activity Reporter (Softpanorama)

Footnotes