Content
Red Flag Linux provides following tools to monitor the usage of system
resources:
- System Monitor
- Performance Alarm
System performance monitoring is an important maintenance and
management task of Red Flag Linux administrators. With the performance
data at hand, sysadm can:
- Understand work load and its impact to system resources.
- Observe the change and trend of work load and resource usage for
future upgrade.
- Use the monitoring results to test different configurations.
- Helps to problem diagnosis and system optimizations.
System monitor and performance alarm provide detailed data of various
system resources, which are presented in a graphical way, when the
monitored data is over or lower than the pre-defined threshold, alarm
is to be triggered to notify users.
System monitor can be used to collect and view the real-time system
performance data and system service actitivies. The monitored data can
be defined as follows:
- Data Type: Made up of three parts: object, counter and instance.
Some object provide system resource data (like memory), while other
objects provide process related data (like the running process).
- Grahy Properties: Use curve graph or bar graph to present the
performance data.
- Display Properties: Choose the color and display ratio.
Performance alarm can be used to collect system performance data
automatically, and threshold can be set for the monitored counters, so
alarm can be triggered if the monitored counter is over or lower than
the threshold.
Similar to system monitor, performance alarm supports the object,
counter and instance selection, user can also set the monitor rate.
System monitor can be started in 3 ways:
1. In Control Panel, click "Performance" icon
2. From start menu, click
"Start->Settings->Performance"
3. In terminal, type "rfmon"
When system monitor is fired up, by default, the data presentation area
and toolbar are displayed. The data presentation area is empty. After
enter some counters, the data will be presented. You can choose to
update automatically or manully.
Some properties of the selected counters are displayed below the data
presentation area, which includes:
- Object
- Counter
- Instance
- Graphical Properties
Counter is the basic monitored object, which includes three elements:
- Object: Logically similar resouces are grouped together to become
performance object. By default, following objects are provided:
- Processor
- Memory
- Network
- Process
- Disk
- Filesys
- Counter: Specific performance data item of an object. For
example, "% Processor Time" (processor time persentage).
- Instance: Used to identify different instances of objects. For
example, the first processor, the second network card...
- From the "New Counter" dialog, select object to be monitored.
- Select one or more counters from the counter list.
- Select one or all instances.
- Click "Add", a new counter should be added to the active counter
list of main window.
From the active counter list, selected the counter to be deleted,
right click mouse button, then click "remove" menu item from the popup
menu; or just selected menu "Counter->Remove".
Each active counter has color and ratio properties, which can be
configured in the display properties box at the right side of the
active counter list.
- Display Color: click the "Display Color" button, popup a color
selection dialog, select appropriate color for the counter.
- Display Ratio: 15 ratio options can be selected (from 0.0000001
to
10,000,000 step by 10), select the appropriate display ratio.
System monitor privides some other operations:
- Clear Display: Clear the data
presentation area
- Curve Graph: Present performance data using curve graph
- Bar Graph: Present performance data using bar graph
- New Counter Set: Remove all active counters
- Store Counters: Store all active counters into a file
- Load Counters: Load active counters from a file
- Pause: Pause the sampling.
- Continue: Continue the sampling.
- Refresh: Do sampling. note: this is appliable only when the graph
is paused.
- Properties: Adjust the sample rate (default is 1 second). Note:
faster sampling rate gives more acturate data, but may result in high
system load.
Select "Alarm" from the left-hand tree of the main window, the defined
alarms are to be shown on the right-hand panel.
- From the right-hand alarm list panel, right click menu item "Add
Alarm", an alarm task dialog will be popped up.
- Enter the alarm task name
- Enter comments
- Select one and only one counter to be monitored.
- Select the threshold type (>, <,=,!=,>=,<=)
- Enter threshold value, it must be integer larger than 0.
- Select reporting type (syslog, email, logfile or command)
- Click "OK"
Select an alarm to be deleted, right click menu item "Delete".
Any changes of alarm tasks can be reflected only when the alarm service
(rfmond) is restarted, to do that, select menu "Action->Restart".