Viewing OpenBSD server utilization with systat


OpenBSD has a number of nifty utilities, and I happened to come across the systat(1) utility this weekend while looking for an executable in /usr/bin. Systat prints out performance data in an ncurses display, and can be used to view CPU saturation, I/O statistics, swap utilization, netstat data, and MBUF and network interface utilization. The utility takes the metric to display as an argument, and allows an interval to be used to control how often data is displayed:

$ systat iostat 5

/0 /1 /2 /3 /4 /5 /6 /7 /8 /9 /10
Load Average >

/0 /10 /20 /30 /40 /50 /60 /70 /80 /90 /100
cpu user|
nice|
system|
interrupt|X
idle|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

/0 /10 /20 /30 /40 /50 /60 /70 /80 /90 /100
wd0 Kps|
tps|

I absolutely love UNIX, BSD and Linux systems. There are so many nifty tools available for these operating systems, and it’s a h00t when you come across a new utility that you didn’t previously know about. Shibby!

This article was posted by Matty on 2006-09-05 21:55:00 -0400 -0400