systat – Installation and Overview

systat is a bundle of several command-line utilities used for real-time Linux and Unix system performance monitoring. It provides the ability to analyse the usage of a computers sub-systems such as CPU, memory, disk, filesystem and network interface usage.

The tools listed below are used via the terminal command line, they’re lightweight and can be scripted for periodic health check and integration into other telemetry pipelines.

1. List of Utilities

Utility	Description
iostat	Reports CPU statistics and I/O stats for block devices and partitions
mpstat	Displays CPU usage per processor/core
pidstat	Shows statistics for individual processes (CPU, memory, I/O)
sar	Collects and reports system activity data over time
sadc	System activity data collector used by “sar”
sa1	Collects binary performance data periodically via cron
sa2	Generates daily summary reports from “sa1” data
sadf	Formats “sar” data into CSV, XML, JSON, etc.
nfsiostat-sysstat	Reports I/O statistics for NFS-mounted filesystems
cifsiostat	Reports I/O statistics for CIFS-mounted filesystems
tapestat	Reports statistics for tape drives connected to the system
isag	GUI tool to graph “sar” data (requires X11)

2. Installation Process

sudo apt update

sudo apt install systat

dpkg -l | grep systat

sudo apt update

sudo apt install systat

dpkg -l | grep systat

Update your package list with “apt update“
Install the “systat” package with “apt install systat“
Confirm installation with “dpkg -l | grep systat“

3. Activation Process

sudo systemctl enable sysstat

sudo systemctl start sysstat

sudo systemctl status sysstat

sudo systemctl enable sysstat

sudo systemctl start sysstat

sudo systemctl status sysstat

The “enable” command ensure service starts at bootup
The “start” command starts the service immediately in the current sesion
And the “status” command returna the service status

4. Basic examples

# CPU and disk I/O statistics every 5 seconds
iostat -xz 5

# Per-core as well as combined CPU usage every 10 seconds
mpstat -P ALL 10 

# Process-level stats (CPU, memory and page-faultsbb, I/O)
pidstat -dru 1

# Report all CPU utilisation statistics every 5 seconds for 5 iterations
sar -u 5 5

# CPU and disk I/O statistics every 5 seconds
iostat -xz 5

# Per-core as well as combined CPU usage every 10 seconds
mpstat -P ALL 10 

# Process-level stats (CPU, memory and page-faultsbb, I/O)
pidstat -dru 1

# Report all CPU utilisation statistics every 5 seconds for 5 iterations
sar -u 5 5

Check the manual pages for all the “systat” utilities listed above. i.e. “man iostat“, “man sar“

5. Related resources

Site	Description
https://github.com/sysstat/sysstat	systat – GitHub page
https://sysstat.github.io/	systat home page