Andryan’s Random Notes

Previously I wrote a post which discusses real-time CPU statistics utility. Now if you need historical data of CPU utilization statistics, use sysstat’s sar. For Fedora and CentOS, there is an official RPM package for sysstat.

Once you have installed sysstat, leave it for a few minutes until you get some records. The data collector runs from /etc/cron.d every 10 minutes (by default) and records all CPU usage. If you have SMP systems, then it will record each CPU’s utilization statistics. The default behaviour of sar is to print ALL CPU statistics combined, use -p to select individual CPU. Have fun watching your CPU utilization stats!