Nmon

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nmon
nmon showing the basics: CPU and memory
Developed by	Nigel Griffiths
OS	AIX, Linux
Genre	System monitor
Website	nmon for AIX and Linux Performance Monitoring

nmon (short for Nigel's Monitor) is a popular performance monitoring tool for AIX and Linux.

1 Description
2 Screenshots
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Description

nmon is the freely available tool used by many thousands of AIX and now Linux systems Administrators and performance tuning technical folk around the world.

Some of its features are:

It is free.
It is a single binary (one for each OS release) so installation is very simple.
In Online Mode it uses curses, which updates the terminal frequently for real-time monitoring.
In Capture Mode, the data is saved to a file in CSV format for later processing and graphing. The file also includes important configuration details that are useful for recommending tuning.
It takes very little CPU time to run but captures the key performance numbers.
Has been in development for 10 years and include many user inspired features.
Concentrates on useful performance information and in a concise layout to aim understanding. This includes: CPU, memory, disks, adapters, networks, NFS, Kernel stats, Filesystems, Workload Mangers (AIX) and Top Processes.
There are three main post processing tools, which are all available for free:
- nmon Analyser is an Excel spreadsheet for graphing the collected data.
- nmon2rrd creates Round-Robin Database (RRD) files via the Open Source RRDtool and then generates graphs and html files to display the data and graphs on a website.
- nmon2web is similar to nmon2rrd but based on Perl.
These tools make it simple to produce reports with the key performance graphs or to automate the collection of performance data and create a website to aid tuning.
As it includes support for older AIX releases and Linux running on x86, POWER or Mainframe this can be the one common tool used to monitor them all.
Although the author (Nigel Griffiths) works for IBM, it is a personal project, not an IBM product.