As stated earlier, a great deal of system administration revolves
around resources and their efficient use. By balancing various resources
against the people and programs that use those resources, you will waste
less money and make your users as happy as possible. However, this leaves
two questions:
The purpose of this chapter is to enable you to answer these questions
by helping you to learn more about resources and how their utilization can
be monitored.
Basic Concepts
Before you can monitor resources, you first have to know what
resources there are to monitor. All systems have the following
resources available:
We will study these resources in more depth in the following
chapters. However, for the time being all you need to keep in mind is
that these resources have a direct impact on system performance, and
therefore, on your users' productivity and happiness.
At its simplest, resource monitoring is nothing more than obtaining
information concerning the utilization of one or more system
resources.
However, it is rarely this simple. First, one must take into
account the resources to be monitored. Then it is necessary to look at
each system to be monitored, paying particular attention to each
system's situation.
The systems you will be monitoring will fall into one of two
categories:
The system is currently experiencing performance problems at
least part of time and you would like to improve its
performance
The system is currently running well and you would like it to
stay that way.
The first category means that you should monitor resources from a
system performance perspective, while the second category means that you
should monitor system resources from a capacity planning
perspective.
Because each perspective has its own unique requirements, we will
now look at each category in more depth.
