sar Cheatsheet

sar can be an incredibly helpful utility when examining system performance, but if not used regularly it's easy to forget which flags to use.

This short post details a number of useful arguments to pass

 

Basic Output

sar

 

CPU Usage per Core

sar -P ALL

 

Memory Usage

sar -r

 

Swap Usage

sar -S

 

I/O

sar -b

 

I/O by Block Device

sar -d -p

 

Check Run Queue and Load Average

sar -q

 

Network Stats

sar -n DEV

Where DEV can be one of the following

  • DEV – Displays network devices vital statistics for eth0, eth1, etc.,
  • EDEV – Display network device failure statistics
  • NFS – Displays NFS client activities
  • NFSD – Displays NFS server activities
  • SOCK – Displays sockets in use for IPv4
  • IP – Displays IPv4 network traffic
  • EIP – Displays IPv4 network errors
  • ICMP – Displays ICMPv4 network traffic
  • EICMP – Displays ICMPv4 network errors
  • TCP – Displays TCPv4 network traffic
  • ETCP – Displays TCPv4 network errors
  • UDP – Displays UDPv4 network traffic
  • SOCK6, IP6, EIP6, ICMP6, UDP6 are for IPv6
  • ALL – This displays all of the above information. The output will be very long.

 

Historic Information

By default, sar will output for the previous 24 hours, however previous days can be checked with

sar -f /var/log/sa/sa15 -n DEV