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Features

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Sysstat's main features:

• Includes four groups of monitoring tools (sar / sadc / sadf, iostat, mpstat, pidstat) for global system performance analysis.
• Can monitor a huge number of different metrics:

1. Input / Output and transfer rate statistics (global, per device, per partition, per network filesystem and per Linux task / PID)
2. CPU statistics (global, per CPU and per Linux task / PID), including support for virtualization architectures
3. Memory and swap space utilization statistics
4. Virtual memory, paging and fault statistics
5. Per-task (per-PID) memory and page fault statistics
6. Global CPU and page fault statistics for tasks and all their children
7. Process creation activity
8. Interrupt statistics (global, per CPU and per interrupt, including potential APIC interrupt sources)
9. Extensive network statistics: network interface activity (number of packets and kB received and transmitted per second, etc.) including failures from network devices; network traffic statistics for IP, TCP, ICMP and UDP protocols based on SNMPv2 standards; support for IPv6-related protocols.
10. NFS server and client activity
11. Socket statistics
12. Run queue and system load statistics
13. Kernel internal tables utilization statistics
14. System and per Linux task switching activity
15. Swapping statistics
16. TTY device activity
17. Power management statistics

• Average statistics values are calculated over the sampling period.
• Works with every Linux kernel (from the old 2.0 to the newest 2.6 ones),
• Most system statistics can be saved in a file for future inspection.
• Allows to configure the length of data history to keep.
• On the fly detection of new devices (disks, network interfaces, etc.) that are created or registered dynamically.
• Support for UP and SMP machines, including machines with hyperthreaded or multi-core processors.
• Support for hotplug CPUs (it detects automagically CPUs that are disabled or enabled on the fly).
• Works on many different architectures, whether 32- or 64-bit.
• Needs very little CPU time to run (written in C).
• System statistics can be exported in various different formats (CSV, XML, etc.). DTD and XML Schema documents are included in sysstat package.
  
• Internationalization support (sysstat has been translated into numerous different languages). Sysstat is now part of the Translation Project.
• Many programs available on the internet to use sysstat's data to make graphs (one of them, isag, is included in sysstat).
  

If you think that other statistics could be useful for the sys admin and so should be added to sysstat, please tell me.

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Features and improvements added to the latest sysstat version:

Sysstat 9.0 stable series - Why should I upgrade from sysstat 8.0.x to 9.0.x?

• Complete new design for sar, sadc and sadf commands. They have been rewritten in a non-monolithic way with a generic design architecture. It is now possible to add new metrics to sar without changing system activity data files format.
• System activity data files have extra header data that enable the user to identify which version of sysstat created them.
• Sysstat can now pretty print device names whose minor numbers are greater than 255. This should be useful on large Linux clusters.
  
• Improved CPU statistics for sar: detailed CPU utilization can be displayed with "sar -u ALL".
• NFS v4 support added to sar.
• Support for SNMP, IP v6 and power management statistics added to sar.
• New metrics added to swap space and memory utilization statistics.
• Option -c has been removed from sar: Task creation and context switch activities have been merged and are now available with option -w.
• sar no longer displays interrupts per processor statistics. mpstat should be used for that.
• sadc can now collect partition statistics in addition to disk ones.
• mpstat can now display stats for all interrupts, including NMI, etc.
• Using option -H with sadf now displays detailed information about a system activity data file (activities that have been collected, etc.)
• Added virtual machine time accounting to sar, mpstat and pidstat.
• sysstat commands display machine architecture and number of CPU in their report header.
• sadf can now display all selected activities horizontally on a single line of data. This makes loading data into a database easier.
• sadf -x now takes into account options -s and -e (which specify a starting and ending time) and also interval and count parameters.
  
• iostat now displays read and write operations per second in its NFS report.
• Extended statistics for devices and partitions are now available with iostat.
• Several options have been added to pidstat and iostat so that the user can better control the output.
• National Language Support improved: Added Indonesian, Chinese (traditional) and Maltese translations.

Sysstat 8.0 stable series - Why should I upgrade from sysstat 7.0.x to 8.0.x?

• Autoconf support added.
• Addition of a new command ("pidstat") aimed at displaying statistics for processes, threads and their children (CPU, memory, I/O, task switching activity...)
• Better hotplug CPU support.
• New VM paging metrics added to sar -B.
• Added field tcp-tw (number of sockets in TIME_WAIT state) to sar -n SOCK.
• iostat can now display the registered device name of device-mapper devices.
• Timestamped comments can now be inserted into data files created by sadc.
• XML Schema document added. Useful with sadf -x.
• National Language Support improved: Added Danish, Dutch, Kirghiz, Vietnamese and Brazilian Portuguese translations.
• Options -x and -X removed from sar. You should now use pidstat instead.
• Some obsolete fields (super*, dquot* and rtsig*) were removed from sar -v. Added field pty-nr (number of pseudo-terminals).