System Activity Report (sar) is a

Unix System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

-derived

system monitor A system monitor is a hardware or software component used to monitor system resources and performance in a computer system. Among the management issues regarding use of system monitoring tools are resource usage and privacy. Monitoring can tra ...

command used to report on various system loads, including CPU activity, memory/paging, interrupts, device load, network and swap space utilization. Sar uses

/proc Proc may refer to:

*  Proč, a village in eastern Slovakia
* '' Proč?'', a 1987 Czech film
*  procfs or proc filesystem, a special file system (typically mounted to ) in Unix-like operating systems for  accessing process information
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filesystem for gathering information.

Platform support

Sar was originally developed for the Unix System V operating system; it is available in AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and other System V based operating systems but it is not available for macOS or FreeBSD. Prior to 2013 there was a bsdsar tool, but it is now deprecated. Most

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distributions provide sar utility through the sysstat package.

Syntax

sar

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-e time -f filename i sec -s time ; : filename Uses filename as the data source for sar. The default is the current daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd. ; : time Selects data up to time. The default is 18:00. ; : sec Selects data at intervals as close as possible to sec seconds.

Example

ser@localhost sar # Displays current CPU activity.

Sysstat package

Additional to sar command, Linux sysstat package in Debian, RedHat Enterprise Linux and SuSE provides additional reporting tools: * * * * * * * * *

References

*
Easy system monitoring with SAR (IBM developerWorks)System Activity Reporter (Softpanorama)

Footnotes