21.3 Operating System Tools

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21.3.1 Windows Performance Monitor

The Windows Performance Monitor is useful for monitoring operating system-level performance. The GUI can be started up on a Windows 2K server in the Administrative Tools icon on the Control Panel. This tool allows graphical display of all aspects of hardware and operating system-level activity. Figure 21.15 shows a picture of a dual-CPU server displaying both processors, memory, and network activity for a relatively idle database server.

Figure 21.15: The Windows Performance Monitor

Figure 21.16 on the other hand shows the Windows Performance Monitor GUI for a highly active single-CPU system. The Windows Task Manager snapshot is added to show how busy this system was when these screenshots were taken.

Figure 21.16: This is a Very Busy Server

There are a multitude of command line and GUI tools used for operating system monitoring and tuning in other operating systems such as Unix or Linux.

21.3.2 Unix Utilities

There are a plethora of tools used in all flavors of Unix and Linux operating systems, both command line utilities and GUI-based monitoring tools. These tools are some of the command line monitoring tools used on Solaris.

• CPU Usage.   sar, vmstat, mpstat, iostat.

• Disk I/O Activity.   sar, iostat.

• Memory Usage.   sar, vmstat.

• Network Usage.   netstat.

Since I am not an experienced systems administrator I see no point in attempting to explain the detailed syntax and use of these tools.

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