Saidar

For a Linux system administrator its quite essential to monitor system resources and their usage to ensure that the system is working in a healthy and normal condition, without any kind of unusual activity.

In this post we take a look at a very simple tool called Saidar that can be used to monitor system resources.

It displays a screen full of information about system resources that refreshes at regular intervals.

The output shows statistics on various system resources including cpu load, memory usage, disk io usage etc.

Saidar is a part of the libstatgrab suite.

The man page definition is ...

saidar  is  a  curses-based  tool for viewing the system statistics available through libstatgrab. Statistics include CPU, processes, load, memory, swap, network I/O, disk I/O, and file system information.

The output keeps updating at specified interval and looks similar to this

Hostname  : desktop        Uptime : 08:55:19          Date : 2020-08-15 17:20:14

Load 1    :   0.28   CPU Idle  :  84.99%  Running   :    22   Zombie    :     0
Load 5    :   0.56   CPU System:   3.22%  Sleeping  :   428   Total     :   466
Load 15   :   1.28   CPU User  :  11.86%  Stopped   :     0   No. Users :     8

Mem Total :  32030M  Swap Total:      0B  Mem Used  : 61.71%  Paging in :     0
Mem Used  :  19766M  Swap Used :      0B  Swap Used :         Paging out:   135
Mem Free  :  12264M  Swap Free :      0B  Total Used:

Disk Name      Read         Write         Network Interface        rx        tx
loop0            0B            0B         lo                      13B       13B
loop1            0B            0B         enp1s0               36824B     4991B
loop2            0B            0B
loop3            0B            0B         Mount Point            Free      Used
loop4            0B            0B         /sys                     0B         -
loop5            0B            0B         /proc                    0B         -
loop6            0B            0B         /dev                 15974M      0.00%
loop7            0B            0B         /dev/pts                 0B         -
sda              0B            0B         /run                  3201M      0.05%
sda1             0B            0B         /                    14252M     84.29%
sdb              0B          135K         /sys/kernel/securit      0B         -
sdb1             0B          135K         /dev/shm             14058M     12.22%
sdc              0B            0B         /run/lock             5116K      0.08%
sdc1             0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup       16015M      0.00%
loop8            0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/unif      0B         -
loop9            0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/syst      0B         -
loop10           0B            0BTotal    /sys/fs/pstore           0B         -
                                          /sys/fs/bpf              0B         -/sys/fs/cgroup/devi

Install Saidar

To install saidar on Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint and similar systems use the apt-get command as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install saidar

To install Saidar on Fedora, CentOS and similar systems use the yum command:

$ sudo yum install statgrab-tools

1. Using Saidar

Launch saidar by simply typing the name.

$ saidar

The refresh delay is 3 seconds by default and can be changed using the "-d" parameter.

$ saidar -d 1

The saidar command shows information including cpu load, memory usage, disk io, disk space usage, network usage. The output would look something like this:

Hostname  : desktop        Uptime : 08:50:18          Date : 2020-08-15 17:15:13

Load 1    :   0.44   CPU Idle  :  88.95%  Running   :    40   Zombie    :     0
Load 5    :   1.04   CPU System:   2.66%  Sleeping  :   415   Total     :   471
Load 15   :   1.68   CPU User  :   8.50%  Stopped   :     0   No. Users :     8

Mem Total :  32030M  Swap Total:      0B  Mem Used  : 61.67%  Paging in :     0
Mem Used  :  19754M  Swap Used :      0B  Swap Used :         Paging out:   374
Mem Free  :  12276M  Swap Free :      0B  Total Used:

Disk Name      Read         Write         Network Interface        rx        tx
loop0            0B            0B         lo                      31B       31B
loop1            0B            0B         enp1s0               36861B     3455B
loop2            0B            0B
loop3            0B            0B         Mount Point            Free      Used
loop4            0B            0B         /sys                     0B         -
loop5            0B            0B         /proc                    0B         -
loop6            0B            0B         /dev                 15974M      0.00%
loop7            0B            0B         /dev/pts                 0B         -
sda              0B            0B         /run                  3201M      0.05%
sda1             0B            0B         /                    14260M     84.28%
sdb              0B          374K         /sys/kernel/securit      0B         -
sdb1             0B          374K         /dev/shm             14060M     12.20%
sdc              0B            0B         /run/lock             5116K      0.08%
sdc1             0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup       16015M      0.00%
loop8            0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/unif      0B         -
loop9            0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/syst      0B         -
loop10           0B            0BTotal    /sys/fs/pstore           0B         -
                                          /sys/fs/bpf              0B         -/sys/fs/cgroup/devi

2. Colored output with Saidar

Saidar outputs colored text when using the "-c" option.

$ saidar -c -d 1

3. Getting help

Use the help option to get details about supported options.

$ saidar -help
Usage: saidar [-d delay] [-c] [-v] [-h]

  -d    Sets the update time in seconds
  -c    Enables coloured output
  -v    Prints version number
  -h    Displays this help information.

Report bugs to <[email protected]>.