How To Install SysStat on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SysStat on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Sysstat is a free and open-source system monitoring tool. This is the best tool I found for debugging performance issues on my Linux systems. You can view the system performance data in real-time or analyze data from the saved archives.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the SysStat monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install SysStat on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing SysStat on Ubuntu 20.04.

By default, SysStat is available on Ubuntu 20.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install SysStat to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install sysstat

Step 3. Configure SysStat.

By default Sysstat monitoring is disabled. Let’s enable the SysStat monitoring and edit the following file and save it:

nano /etc/default/sysstat

Set ENABLED to true for configuration:

ENABLED="true"

Save and close the file, then enable the SysStat service and start it by executing the command:

sudo systemctl enable sysstat
sudo systemctl start sysstat

Step 4. Realtime Monitoring Using Sysstat.

Once successfully installed, you can get a real-time system static command-line tool. Below are some about various static to view on the command line:

• iostat – shows an overview of CPU and I/O statistics for drives and partitions
• mpstat– displays processor statistics.
• pidstat – gives an overview of I/O, memory statistics for processes.
• sar – used for collecting and saving all the system activities and reports.
• sadc– collects system usage activity and writes it to a file.

For example, check CPU usage:

sar -u

For example, check the display device:

iostat -d

For example, View display usage:

iostat -x

For example, View current processes:

pidstat -d

Congratulations! You have successfully installed SysStat. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the SysStat monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official SysStat website.