Home Command line utilities How To View Linux System Statistics With Saidar

How To View Linux System Statistics With Saidar

By sk
Published: Updated: 3.9K views

There are plenty of command line and graphical monitoring tools exists to view system statistics in Linux and Unix operating systems. The most popular and most widely used tool is top. There are also a few good alternatives available to top. Using top and top-like programs, we can get the system summary information as well as a list of processes or threads currently being managed by the Linux kernel. Today, we will see yet another command line utility named Saidar.

What is Saider?

Saidar is a simple, curses-based tool for viewing Linux system statistics and resource usage in real-time. It is part of libstatgrab library that can be used to access key system statistics including CPU, processes, load, memory, swap, network I/O, disk I/O, and file system information.

Saider is written in C and tested in GNU/Linux and various Unix-like distributions such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, DragonFly BSD, HP-UX and AIX.

Install Saidar in Linux

Saidar is available in the default repositories of popular Linux distributions.

To install Saidar on Debian, Ubuntu and its derivatives, run:

$ sudo apt install saidar

Saidar is available in EPEL repository for RHEL and its clones like CentOS, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux. Enable EPEL repository using command:

$ sudo dnf install epel-release

Then install Saidar with command:

$ sudo dnf install saidar

Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install saidar

OpenSUSE:

$ sudo zypper install saidar

View Linux System Statistics With Saidar

To view the current system statistics with Saidar in Linux, simply run:

$ saidar

Sample output:

Hostname  : ostechnix      Uptime : 05:58:30          Date : 2020-09-15 17:10:46

Load 1    :   0.65   CPU Idle  :  97.14%  Running   :    51   Zombie    :     0
Load 5    :   0.63   CPU System:   0.75%  Sleeping  :   222   Total     :   277
Load 15   :   0.67   CPU User  :   8.68%  Stopped   :     2   No. Users :     1

Mem Total :   7869M  Swap Total:   2047M  Mem Used  : 39.65%  Paging in :     0
Mem Used  :   3120M  Swap Used :      0B  Swap Used :  0.00%  Paging out:     0
Mem Free  :   4749M  Swap Free :   2047M  Total Used: 31.46%

Disk Name      Read         Write         Network Interface        rx        tx
loop0            0B            0B         tap-d8f1eebb39f          0B        0B
loop1            0B            0B         mpqemubr0                0B        0B
loop2            0B            0B         virbr0                   0B        0B
loop3            0B            0B         wlp9s0                  86B       57B
loop4            0B            0B         enp5s0                   0B        0B
loop5            0B            0B         mpqemubr0-dummy          0B        0B
loop6            0B            0B         lo                       0B        0B
loop7            0B            0B         virbr0-nic               0B        0B
sda              0B        28672B
sda1             0B        28672B         Mount Point            Free      Used
sr0              0B            0B         /sys                     0B         -
sdb              0B            0B         /proc                    0B         -
loop8            0B            0B         /dev                  3890M      0.00%
loop9            0B            0B         /dev/pts                 0B         -
loop10           0B            0B         /run                   785M      0.24%
loop11           0B            0B         /                    44051M     90.09%
loop12           0B            0B         /sys/kernel/securit      0B         -
loop13           0B            0B         /dev/shm              3487M     11.36%
loop14           0B            0B         /run/lock             5116K      0.08%
loop15           0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup        3934M      0.00%
loop16           0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/unif      0B         -
loop17           0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/syst      0B         -
loop18           0B            0B         /sys/fs/pstore           0B         -
loop19           0B            0B         /sys/fs/bpf              0B         -
loop20           0B            0B         /sys/fs/cgroup/pids      0B         -
loop21           0B            0BTotal    /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,      0B         -
                                          /sys/fs/cgroup/memo      0B         -/sys/fs/cgroup/net_     0B     -/sys/fs/cgroup/perf     0B     -/sys/fs/cgroup/devi     0B
View Linux System Statistics With Saidar
View Linux System Statistics With Saidar

As you can see in the above output, the top row shows the folowing details:

  • Linux system's hostname,
  • total uptime
  • and the current date and time.

The second row displays the CPU usage statistics such as,

  • CPU load,
  • total number of processes,
  • total no of currently running/sleeping/stopped/zombie processes,
  • and total number of logged-in users.

The third row displays the memory usage details such as,

  • total memory,
  • how much memory is currently being used,
  • and how much memory is free.
  • swap usage (total, used and free)
  • paging in and out.

All the memory usage details are shown in MB.

The fourth column shows the hard disk, network and file system details such as,

  • disk partitions,
  • loopback devices,
  • Disk I/O speed,
  • no of available network interface cards,
  • network I/O,
  • system mount points,
  • total percentage of free and used disk space by each file system.

Just like top command, Saidar will keep running and monitoring the system resources until you manually exit it by pressing q.

Display system statistics in colour

To enable coloured output, use -c flag.

$ saidar -c

Sample output:

Display system statistics in colour with Saidar
Display system statistics in colour with Saidar

Change refresh interval

By default, Saidar updates the statistics every 3 seconds. You can change this refresh delay interval with -d flag.

$ saidar -d 5

Here, I have set 5 seconds as refresh interval. Meaning - Saidar will update the statistics every 5 seconds.

You can even combine the parameters to get a desired output.

$ saidar -c -d 2

As per the above example, Saidar will output system statistics in colour and update the stats every 2 seconds.

Getting help

To display Saidar help section, run:

$ saidar -h

Sample output:

Usage: saidar [-d delay] [-c] [-v] [-h]

  -d    Sets the update time in seconds
  -c    Enables coloured output
  -v    Prints version number
  -h    Displays this help information.

Report bugs to <https://libstatgrab.org/issues>.

Conclusion

Saidar is just a simple, light-weight monitoring utility to get the basic system resource details. It does the job just fine. However, if you want to know insights of everything happening on a Linux system in real-time, you should consider using Netdata and Doppler.

Resource:

Related read:

Featured image by Lorenzo from Pexels.

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