Activity monitoring using OS native tools

It is important to understand and know what condition your server is in at all times. This is important so that you can remedy any unwanted behavior quickly and prevent potential data loss. In this section we will focus on the tools that come already installed with the Operating System. Bear in mind that this is far from being a complete guide to the server monitoring. Refer to other books that talk about the administration of your specific Operating System.

Linux

In the following section we will present a few basic but quite useful Linux tools and services that can be used to monitor and determine the state of a particular service or resource usage.

Server load

There are quite a few tools that you can use to determine the status of the server. The first and most commonly used is top. This command is a part of every standard Linux distribution. To use it just open the command prompt and execute it under a user account that has administrative rights...