Sar Unix

The System Activity Report (sar) is a Unix System V-derived command used to monitor system activities, including CPU usage, memory/paging, interrupts, device load, network traffic, and swap space utilization. It retrieves information from the /proc filesystem on Linux systems.

Originally developed for Unix System V, sar is available on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and other System V-based operating systems but not on macOS or FreeBSD after the deprecation of bsdsar in 2013. On Linux, it is included in the sysstat package, which is commonly provided by major distributions.

The syntax for sar includes flags such as -f (specifying a data file), -e (setting an end time), and -i (defining data collection intervals). The sysstat package also offers additional tools: sa1 collects system activity data, sa2 generates daily reports, sadf outputs data in various formats like CSV or XML, and other utilities include iostat (for I/O statistics), mpstat (processor-related stats), pidstat (process statistics), nfsiostat (NFS stats), and cifsiostat (CIFS stats).

Related tools mentioned include atopsar, Nmon, sag, ksar, CURT, and isag for graphing or analyzing sar data.