Monitoring CPU usage

In this recipe, we are going to use the sar command to monitor CPU usage on the system.

Getting ready

The commands used in this recipe have been performed on a Sun Solaris machine. Hence the command output may vary in different Unix and Linux-related systems.

How to do it...

We can use the sar command with the -u switch to monitor CPU utilization:

bash-3.2$ sar -u 10 8 
SunOS usstlz-pinfsi09 5.10 Generic_150400-04 sun4u    08/06/2014 
 
23:32:17    %usr    %sys    %wio   %idle 
23:32:27      80      14       3      3 
23:32:37      70      14      12      4 
23:32:47      72      13      21      4 
23:32:57      76      14       6      3 
23:33:07      73      10      13      4 
23:33:17      71       8      17      4 
23:33:27      67       9      20      4 
23:33:37      69      10      17      4 
 
Average       73      11      13      4 

In the preceding command with the -u switch, two values are...