Instrumentation tools for Ubuntu

If you are a developer, administrator or you just want to track down some malfunction of your system, then some of these tools can be very handy.

sysdig

sysdig is a open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze.
Think of it as strace + tcpdump + lsof + awesome sauce.

systemtap

SystemTap provides infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux system. This assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem. SystemTap provides a simple command line interface and scripting language for writing instrumentation for a live running system.

htop

Htop is an ncursed-based process viewer similar to top, but it allows to scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and their full command lines.

ethtool

ethtool can be used to query and change settings such as speed, auto- negotiation and checksum offload on many network devices, especially Ethernet devices.

EtherApe

EtherApe displays network activity graphically. Active hosts are shown as circles of varying size, and traffic among them is shown as lines of varying width.

Bandwidth Monitor NG

Bandwidth Monitor NG is a small and simple console-based live bandwidth monitor.

dstat

Dstat allows you to view all of your network resources instantly, you can for example, compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput.

hping

hping3 is a network tool able to send custom ICMP/UDP/TCP packets and to display target replies like ping does with ICMP replies.

nast

nast is a packet sniffer and lan analyzer and can sniff in normal mode or in promiscuous mode the packets on a network interface and log it. Filters can be applied and the sniffed data can be saved in a separated file.

Install instructions

sudo aptitude install systemtap htop ethtool etherape bwm-ng hping3 nast
curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.draios.com/stable/install-sysdig | sudo bash

IOzone Filesystem Benchmark

A very simple approach for measuring a hard disk throughput (at least reading is):

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

But for a more exhaustive measurement, taking in account tests like writing, random access etc. you could use IOzone, which is available for Linux and Windows.
It can generate Excel files which permits to create charts from the plain measurement numbers.

Example run

1. Make sure you have some valid partition with a valid filesystem created on the disk to test. For example, on your third disk, the first partition is a XFS filesystem.


2. Mount the partition and enter it as working directory:
   
   

   mkdir /tmp/test ; sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /tmp/test; cd /tmp/test



3. Now run the IOzone test (we put a small maximum limit to get results quickly):
   
   

   sudo iozone -Ra -g 6M -b /tmp/Results.wks



4. Finally, unmount the partition:
   

   cd /tmp ; sudo umount /tmp/test