sysstat includes tools that can also report on CPU and RAM utilization. Although it’s true you can already do this with top, what makes sysstat even more useful is that it provides a simple mechanism to log system statistics like CPU load, RAM, and I/O stats . View Disk Statistics Another useful metric to pull from sar is disk statistics. The -b option gives you a basic list of disk I/O information: $ sar -b Linux 2.6.24-22-server (kickseed) 01/07/2012 07:44:20 PM tps rtps wtps bread/s bwrtn/s 07:45:01 PM 8.03 0.00 8.03 0.00 106.61 07:55:01 PM 8.78 0.14 8.64 3.35 127.59 08:05:01 PM 7.16 0.00 7.16 0.00 61.14 08:15:01 PM 8.17 0.14 8.03 5.82 139.02 08:25:01 PM 9.50 0.06 9.44 4.09 212.62 08:35:01 PM 8.27 0.00 8.27 0.01 74.66 08:45:01 PM 8.04 0.00 8.04 0.00 71.51 08:55:01 PM 7.64 0.00 7.64 0.00 66.46 09:01:18 PM 7.11 0.00 7.11 0.36 63.73 09:05:01 PM 7.61 0.00 7.61 0.00 72.11 Average: 8.11 ...