System Activity Report (sar) is a Unix System V-derived system monitor command used to report on various system loads, including CPU 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 the Unix System V operating system; it is available in AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and other System V based operating systems but it is not available for macOS or FreeBSD. Prior to 2013 there was a bsdsar tool, but it is now deprecated.2
Most Linux distributions provide sar utility through the sysstat package.
Syntax
sar [-flags] [ -e time ] [ -f filename ] [-i sec ] [ -s time ] -f filename Uses filename as the data source for sar. The default is the current daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd. -e time Selects data up to time. The default is 18:00. -i sec Selects data at intervals as close as possible to sec seconds.Example
[user@localhost]$ sar # Displays current CPU activity.Sysstat package
Additional to sar command, Linux sysstat package in Debian,3 RedHat Enterprise Linux and SuSE provides additional reporting tools:
- sar(1): Collect, report, or save system activity information. – Linux User Commands Manual
- sa1(8): Collect and store binary data in the system activity daily data file. – Linux Administration and Privileged Commands Manual
- sa2(8): shell variant of sar, supporting the same flags as sar command which write a daily report in the /var/log/sa directory. – Linux Administration and Privileged Commands Manual
- sadf(1): , similar to sar but can write its data in different formats (CSV, XML, etc.). This is useful to load performance data into a database, or import them in a spreadsheet to make graphs.
- iostat(1): reports basic CPU statistics and input/output statistics for devices, partitions and network filesystems. – Linux User Commands Manual
- mpstat(1): reports individual or combined processor related statistics. – Linux User Commands Manual
- pidstat(1): reports statistics for Linux tasks (processes) : I/O, CPU, memory, etc. – Linux User Commands Manual
- nfsiostat(1): reports input/output statistics for network filesystems (NFS). – Linux User Commands Manual
- cifsiostat(1): reports I/O statistics for CIFS resources. – Linux User Commands Manual
See also
- atopsar
- Nmon
- sag - "system activity graph" command4
- ksar- BSD licensed Java-based application to create graph of all parameters from the data collected by Unix sar utilities.
- CURT, IBM AIX CPU Usage Reporting Tool
- isag, tcl based command to plot sar/sysstat data
- sar(1) – Solaris 11.4 User Commands Reference Manual
- Easy system monitoring with SAR (IBM developerWorks)
- System Activity Reporter (Softpanorama)
- Article on sar at Computerhope
Footnotes
References
"SYSSTAT". sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr. http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/man_sar.html ↩
"FreshPorts -- sysutils/bsdsar: System Activity Reporter for FreeBSD". www.freshports.org. https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/bsdsar ↩
"Debian -- Details of package sysstat in sid". packages.debian.org. https://packages.debian.org/sid/sysstat ↩
"sag(1)" (PDF). SUNOS Reference Manual. Mountain View, California: Sun Microsystems. 1993-02-24. pp. 1–895. Retrieved 2010-05-04. sag - system activity graph [...] DESCRIPTION sag graphically displays the system activity data stored in a binary data file by a previous sar(1) run. https://www.filibeto.org/sun/lib/solaris2.5-docs/40.3/802-1930-01.pdf ↩