How to Monitor System Activity, Hardware and System information in Linux

For any Linux user monitoring the system’s performance can be an intricate task. Most of the Linux distributions already come with loads of monitoring tools. These monitoring tools provide metrics that can be used to get information about system activities. Monitoring the system allows you to trace the root of causes hampering the systems performance. One of the important parts of system monitoring is seeking information on system activity, hardware and memory utilization. Let’s see how to monitor system activity, hardware and system information in Linux.

There is a simple Linux command that reports about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps and CPU activity.

Just open the terminal and type the following command

# vmstat 3

Sample output

Again to display the memory utilization slabinfo type the following command in terminal

# vmstat -m

Get information about active/inactive memory pages

# vmstat -a