Workshop

• A paging graph
• A memory utilization graph
Because some implementations of sar are different, you should see the sar man page to see which
abbreviation corresponds to which statistic. All the graphs should have “time” as the X axis so that you
can see how one graph relates to another. (See the sample graph in Figure 23.3.)
Figure 23.3 A sar report converted into a Quattro Pro graph.
You can see in Figure 23.3 that user activity (%usr), system activity, (%sys), waiting for I/O activity
(%wio), and idle time (%idle) all add up to 100 percent. Although you’re not running out of processors
on this graph, you can see that you’ve got a %wio problem: This is evident when you graph the paging
activity; it pretty much follows the curve of the %wio. As with the vmstat example earlier, you
probably have a memory and swap problem.
As far as manually gathering statistics from other operating systems is concerned, you need to know the
following points:
• NetWare really requires an SNMP management station to deal with its resources; there’s no
way to extract the server resources manually.
• You’ve already seen how cool the Windows System Monitor is. You can also use the NT
Performance Monitor (PERFMON.EXE) and get it to store reports in comma-separated format,
which you can easily import into a spreadsheet.
Commercial packages are also available for tracking the resources of your servers; they’re reasonably
inexpensive and can save you a lot of work. For example, UNIX users should check out SarCheck by
Aurora Software (www.sarcheck.com). A solution like this is a good compromise between performing
resource baselining by hand and buying into a full SNMP solution.
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