Linux Server Monitoring

Performance Monitoring for Linux Servers

Linux-based servers are being widely used by many enterprises to power their data centers. Monitoring server hardware, the server hardware, and critical parts of the server operating system including the processors, memory, disk, and network interfaces is essential for ensuring that the applications running on these servers are working efficiently at all times.

eG Enterprise offers 100% web-based Linux server monitoring and application performance monitoring. Various Linux variants including Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Ubuntu Linux, and CentOS can be monitored by eG Enterprise. Using a web-based console, administrators can track the status of their heterogeneous Linux server farms, receive alerts when problems happen, view reports on historical performance, and plan the capacity of their server farms.

To monitor a Linux server, you need to deploy the eG agent software. The agent deployment takes at most a couple of minutes, and soon as the agent is started, it can start monitoring the Linux server hardware, operating system and application processes with little configuration. Baselines for all the collected metrics are pre-defined in eG Enterprise based on industry standard best practices, so you can start receiving alerts when a process fails, a critical event is logged in the server log, or when a disk fills up. If you are interested, the same eG agent can be upgraded to monitor critical public domain applications such as Apache web servers, MySQL databases, and Jboss or Tomcat web application servers running on the Linux servers. Commercial applications hosted on Linux such as Oracle database servers, WebLogic or WebSphere application servers, and others can also be monitored using eG Enterprise.For a complete list of supported platforms, click here.

The Linux server monitoring can be done in an agent-based or in an agentless manner, and administrators can pick and choose the servers that have to be monitored with agents (e.g., critical production servers) and those that can be monitored in an agentless manner (e.g., staging servers). The monitoring system is licensed per server OS, and not based on the number of CPU cores or sockets, or based on the applications running on it.

With its ability to monitor 10+ operating systems including Microsoft Windows 2008, 2003, 2000, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HPUX, OS/400, and OpenVMS, eG Enterprise provides a single pane of glass from where administrators can monitor their heterogeneous multi-vendor data center servers from a single console.

What the eG Linux Server Monitor Reveals

CapabilityMetricDescriptionCPU Monitoring

CPU utilization per processor of a server

Run queue length of a server

Top 10 CPU consuming processes on a server

Top 10 servers by CPU utilization

• Know if a server is sized correctly in terms of processing power;
• Determine times of day when CPU usage level is high;
• Determine how many processes are contending for CPU resources simultaneously;
• Know which processes are causing a CPU spike on the server;
• Know which servers have high CPU utilization, and which ones are under-utilized;

Memory Monitoring

Free memory availability

Swap memory usage

Top 10 processes consuming memory on the server

Top 10 servers by memory usage

• Track free memory availability on your servers;
• Determine if your servers are adequately sized in terms of memory availability;
• Determine servers with high swap usage;
• Know which processes are taking up memory on a server;
• Know which servers have the lowest free memory available and hence, may be candidates for memory upgrades;

I/O Monitoring

Blocked processes

Disk activity

Top 10 processes by disk activity

• Track the number of processes blocked on I/O;
• Indicates if there is an I/O bottleneck on the server;
• Track the percentage of time that the disks on a server are heavily used;
• Compare the relative busy times of the disks on a server to determine if you can better balance the load across the disks of a server;
• Determine which processes are causing disk reads/writes;

Uptime Monitoring

Current uptime

Top 10 servers by uptime

• Determine how long a server has been up;
• Track times when a server was rebooted;
• Determine times when unplanned reboots happened;
• Know which servers have not been rebooted for a long time;

Disk Space Monitoring

Total capacity

Free space

• Know the total capacity of each of the disk partitions of a server;
• Track the free space on each of the disk partitions of a server;
• Proactively be alerted of high disk space levels on a server;

Network Traffic Monitoring

Incoming and outgoing traffic

• Track the traffic into and out of a server through each interface;
• Identify servers and network interfaces with maximum traffic;

Linux Network Monitoring

Packet loss

Average delay

Availability

• Track the quality of a network connection to a server;
• Identify times when excessive packet loss happens;
• Determine the average delay of packets to a server;
• Determine times when a server is not reachable over the network;

TCP Monitoring

Current connections

Incoming/outgoing TCP connection rate

TCP retransmissions

• Track currently established TCP connections to a server;
• Monitor the server workload by tracking the rate of TCP connections to and from a server;
• Track the percentage of TCP segments retransmitted from the server to clients;
• Be alerted when TCP retransmits are high and therefore, are likely to cause significant slowdowns in application performance;

Process Monitoring

Processes running

CPU usage

Memory usage

• Track the number of processes of a specific application that are running simultaneously;
• Identify times when a specific application process is not running;
• Monitor the CPU usage of an application over time;
• Determine times when an application is taking excessive CPU resources;
• Track the memory usage of an application over time;

Server LogMonitoring

New events

• Obtain details of the events in the system logs files (/var/adm/messages, sulog, syslog, etc.);