When running servers or working with virtual machines, you need to have total control over your system’s hardware in order to make sure you are using your resources efficiently. If you notice that your CPU usage is constantly at 100% and your RAM usage seems to be spiking up and down all the time, it can be hard to figure out what’s going on. Fortunately, there are several free tools available in Linux that will allow you to monitor these resources effectively so you can diagnose issues as they arise and prevent problems from occurring in the future. Have You Ever Wondered How to Monitor Your Ram and Cpu in Linux?
Things To Know About Linux
Table of Contents
Monitoring your CPU is always important, as it tells you how much of your hardware resources are being used by processes. Here’s how you can keep an eye on it using top command on your Linux machine.
Things you will need
-Linux distro with support for hardware monitoring -minimal linux knowledge -colors enabled in vim
Things To Do Before Installing Anything
Check what kind of processor your computer has. Processors are either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on how many bits they use to store data. The majority of computers sold today run a 64-bit version of Windows.
Installing Collectd
In order to monitor your CPU usage, you’ll need a piece of software called Collectd. The great thing about Collectd is that it will run on any major Linux distribution, as well as Solaris and Mac OS X. It’s easy to set up, too; just type sudo apt-get install collectd , then enter your root password when prompted.
Configuring Collectd
If you’re running a Unix-like system like Linux or Mac OS X, you might have heard of collectd, a system for monitoring performance metrics. In Debian/Ubuntu, collectd can be installed using apt-get with: $ sudo apt-get install collectd . Once installed, you need to configure it. The default configuration is suitable for most people, but you should at least add your own username and hostname so that it doesn’t report on every other computer on your network.
How to use collectd to view graphs
collectd is a daemon that runs on Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, BSD variants, Solaris) that collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store them locally or remotely, such as over an Internet connection. This can be useful for centralized logging or monitoring of distributed systems.
Conclusion
Monitoring resource usage on a Linux machine is actually pretty easy, even if you’re not entirely familiar with shell scripting. Here are a few simple tricks for monitoring various resources like memory and cpu usage. If you’ve ever been curious about how to monitor these values over time, you might want to give one of these methods a try.