Regarding CPU Utilization in Solaris

Question

I would like to know how to find out the following for a Solaris box:

1. Number of occurrences of CPU Utilization at 100%

2. Duration of time CPU stayed at 100%

Is there any variant of sar command to find this out?

Thank you in advance, Chaitanya

Answer 1

Strictly speaking, nearly every individual instruction executed happens at 100% utilization. :)

But seriously. You probably don't want to track individual periods of high utilization. You probably want a statistics aggregation which averages usage over regular time periods, which is all that sar does.

You could install something like munin, or if you already have a snmp-counter application like cacti installed somewhere, you could just query values from the Solaris system via SNMP. Some availability-monitors like nagios are extensible in that they can measure CPU (or other) usages over regular time periods and present that information to you in a graph.

Answer 2

Solaris comes with sar by default. If it's not installed you should be able to get the package off the install media. That should give the info you need.

For a good lightweight, easily installed interface into system performance, search for the "dim_STAT" tool.