5 Commonly Used Command Line Monitoring Tools for Red Hat

What is Red Hat?

Red Hat is the name of a software company in the business of assembling open source components for Linux OS. It was one of the first companies in the market to understand that “free” software could indeed be sold as a product. The advantage of purchasing distribution from Red Hat, instead of assembling it on one’s own at zero cost, is the kind of available support.

For the Linux market, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is available. It has been developed specially for the business market. RHEL was earlier known as Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. RHEL has been created on free, open source code. Its OS supports different kinds of workloads in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Those candidates who want to become full time Linux administrators can enrol for a Red Hat System Administration course. Here key-command line concepts and different enterprise-level tools are taught. At the next level of this System Administration course, these concepts are developed further. The course takes participants deeper into troubleshooting and administering file systems, logical volume management, partitioning and access control.

Command Line tools to monitor Linux processes

The job of a Linux Administrator is not an easy one. He or she has to monitor and debug several problems in Linux System performance. Here is a list of major command line monitoring tools usefil for every Linux Administrator:

1. Top- The top command is a performance monitoring program used by several administrators. It shows all the running and active real-time processes, and also updates these. CPU usage, Swap memory, Cache size, Buffer size and Process PID are some of the updates shown here. The top command is helpful for a system administrator to monitor and take appropriate action.
2. VmStat Virtual Memory Statistics- This command is used to display different statistics of kernel threads, system processes, I/O blocks, CPU activity and several others.
3. Lsof List Open Files- Lsof can display list of all the open files and processes. The list of open files includes devices, network sockets, pipes, processes and disk files.
4. Tcpdump Network Packet Analyzer- One of the most commonly used command line tools is the Network Packet Analyzer or packets sniffer program. Its purpose is to filter TCP/IP packets received or transferred on a specific interface over an entire network.
5. Netstat (Network Statistics)- Netstat tracks incoming and outgoing packet statistics, along with interface statistics. It is helpful for every system administrator for monitoring network performance and for handling network issues.
6. Htop (Linux process monitoring)- An interactive and real time Linux tool for monitoring processes, Htop is quite similar to the Linux top command. The difference is that Htop has rich features like user friendly interface for process management, vertical and horizontal view of processes and others.

So to become a Red Hat Certified System Administrator, one has to learn about command line tools. To know more, enrol for a Red Hat System administration course.