What does sysstat collect information for?

Ask Fedora
1

Hi folks,

I’ve recently noticed that the sysstat tool collects performance information at regular intervals from my Fedora installation.

Sep 20 14:20:38 ankur.workstation systemd[1]: Starting system activity accounting tool...
Sep 20 14:20:38 ankur.workstation systemd[1]: sysstat-collect.service: Deactivated successfully.
Sep 20 14:20:38 ankur.workstation systemd[1]: Finished system activity accounting tool.

Would any one know where/how this information is then used? I.e, that’s OK that it’s collecting information, but what is being done with this information? I know it isn’t being sent anywhere—so what on my installation is using this gathered information? If nothing, can I disable sysstat?

I’ve checked the sysstat website and man sysstat, but it only says what it does—not what is done with the information. Would anyone know?

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2

Linux servers come with lots of system monitoring utilities preinstalled. However, RHEL-based servers don’t include the sysstat collection. Among others, sysstat includes sar and iostat .

nowhere, you decide what to do with that information for personal purpose, and test system performance.

System statistics collected by sar: → GitHub - sysstat/sysstat: Performance monitoring tools for Linux

Sysstat Features → GitHub - sysstat/sysstat: Performance monitoring tools for Linux

  1. iostat: Reports all statistics about your CPU and I/O statistics for I/O devices.
  2. mpstat : Details about CPUs (individual or combined).
  3. pidstat : Statistics about running processes/task, CPU, memory etc.
  4. sar : Save and report details about different resources (CPU, Memory, IO, Network, kernel etc…).
  5. sadc : System activity data collector, used for collecting data in backend for sar.
  6. sa1 : Fetch and store binary data in sadc data file. This is used with sadc.
  7. sa2 : Summaries daily report to be used with sar.
  8. Sadf : Used for displaying data generated by sar in different formats (CSV or XML).
  9. Sysstat : Man page for sysstat utility.
  10. nfsiostat-sysstat : I/O statistics for NFS.
  11. cifsiostat : Statistics for CIFS.

amount other just to make a note about it features, Personal I’m on under :fedora: 34 and dont’ have this service active.

Removing sysstat

To remove sysstat. To do things cleanly you can first stop and disable the service before you uninstall the package:

systemctl disable --now sysstat
dnf remove sysstat

Regards., HTH…

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3

Systat is a very handy tool.
It collects the last month performance data every 10 minutes for almost everything.

The info can be accessed by the tool “sar”.
The reports are stored locally under
/var/log/sa/

Examples:
sar -A
sar -n SOCK -f /var/log/sa/sa17
sar -P all -f /var/log/sa/sa18
b4e5e1041957b4ce5a8f503ce79eb4114ca821a3.png

1 Like
4

Thanks @hhlp! That clarifies it.

I know it’s maybe useful, but the fact that I’ve never looked at the data it collects says that I won’t use it. So I’ve gone ahead and uninstalled it from my machines now :slight_smile:

5

I used to use sar regularly when I was concerned with potentially overloading my system. That was while I was using a 2 core machine with no hyper-threading. Have not used it recently but probably should to monitor my continuous heavy (80+%) cpu loads even on my 6 core 12 thread system.

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