Monitoring the Disk, CPU and Network Usage

Monitoring your system’s performance manually allows you to accurately determine your minimum system requirements in order to use Iguana effectively. This section shows you how to monitor your machine’s disk, CPU and network usage when running Iguana in Windows, Unix and Mac OS X operating systems. For each operating system, system performance was measured after one hour of activity.

The remaining pages in this tutorial provide detailed explanations of monitoring performance in Windows, Unix and Mac OS X.

 Windows performance

It is possible to monitor your machine’s overall CPU, disk and network usage using applications included on Windows operating systems.

Tools: Perfmon, Windows Task Manager.

Monitoring Windows

1. Windows: Adding Logs and Counters in Perfmon
2. Windows: Starting the Counters (perfmon)
3. Windows: Viewing the Results Data (perfmon)
4. Windows: Viewing the CPU Usage (task manager)
5. Windows: Viewing the Disk Usage (perfmon)
6. Windows: Viewing the Network Usage (perfmon)

Unix performance

It is possible to monitor your Unix machine’s overall CPU, disk and network usage using tools available on most Unix systems.

Tools: top, vmstat (CPU usage), sar, iostat (disk usage), netstat (network usage).

Monitoring Unix

1. Unix: Viewing the CPU Usage (top)
2. Unix: Viewing the Disk Usage (iostat)
3. Unix: Viewing the Network Usage (netstat)

Note: The applications listed above may not be available for all Unix implementations. In such cases, try to search for a suitable alternative using your favourite search engine.

Mac OS X performance

You can monitor your Mac system’s overall CPU, disk and network usage using the built-in Activity Monitor application. You can access the Activity Monitor from Applications/Utilities.

Tools: Activity Monitor.

Monitoring Mac OS X

1. Mac OS X: Viewing the CPU Usage
2. Mac OS X: Viewing the Disk Usage
3. Mac OS X: Viewing Network Usage