EX442 System Monitoring and Performance Tuning Certificate of Expertise

Systems Monitoring and Performance Tuning

EX442 System Monitoring and Performance Tuning Certificate of Expertise

• use utilities such as vmstat,iostat,mpstat,sar, gnome-system-monitor, top and others to analyze and report system behavior
• configure systems to provide performance metrics over a network via SNMP
• query system performance metrics using SNMP
• configure graphical SNMP client utilities such as MRTG,RRDtool, etc.
• use the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) mechanism to implement restrictions on critical system resources
• use /proc/sys, sysctl and /sys to examine and modify and set kernel run-time parameters
• use utilities such as dmesg, dmidecode, x86info, sysreport etc. to profile system hardware configurations
• analyze system and application behavior using tools such as ps, strace, top, OProfile and Valgrind
• configure systems to run SystemTap scripts
• alter process priorities of both new and existing processes
• configure systems to support alternate page sizes for applications that use large amounts of memory
• given multiple versions of applications that perform the same or similar tasks, choose which version of the application to run on a system based on its observed performance characteristics
• configure disk subsystems for optimal performance using mechanisms such as software RAID, swap partition placement, I/O scheduling algorithm selection, file system layout and others
• configure kernel behavior by altering module parameters
• calculate network buffer sizes based on known quantities such as bandwidth and round-trip time and set system buffer sizes based on those calculations