System - OS Test

Stability, responsiveness, and efficiency of a Linux system mainly depend how well the system handles CPU switches between different processes or threads, hardware interrupts, applications requests, disk utilization, and registry usage. Keeping track of these factors helps administrators prevent system crashes, slowdowns, and data loss due to high resource usage, ensures smooth and efficient operation of Linux applications and hardware and helps troubleshooting performance issues related to CPU, memory, disk, and registry usage. The System - OS test can hep administrators in this regard!

This test monitors the Linux systems in the target Linux Systems Group, and for , each system reports how long the CPU spent time handling the hardware interrupts, how well the disk and registry is being utilized and the rate at which the application requests are being processed. These metrics helps administrators to quickly detect if there is any abnormal pattern or bottlenecks in the system's operations and enables them take necessary actions to prevent anomalies at the earliest.

Target of the test : A Linux Systems Group

Agent deploying the test : A remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every Linux system

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The nick name of the Linux Systems Group component for which this test is to be configured.
Port	Refers to the port at which the specified host listens to. By default, this is NULL.
Inside View Using	To obtain the 'inside view' of performance of the systems - i.e., to measure the internal performance of the systems - this test uses a light-weight eG VM Agent software deployed on each of the systems. Accordingly, this parameter is by default set to eG VM Agent.
Report By User	This flag is set to No by default. This implies that the Linux systems in environments will always be identified using the system name. In other words, this test will, by default, report measures for every systemname. On the other hand, if you want this test to report the measures for every user on a system, then set this flag to Yes. In such a case, this test will report the measures for every username_on_systemname.
Report Powered OS	By default, this flag is set to Yes, then the 'inside view' tests will report measures for even those Linux systems that do not have any users logged in currently. The systems will be identified by their name and not by the username_on_systemname. On the other hand, if this flag is set to No, then this test will not report measures for those systems to which no users are logged in currently.
Is Cloud VMs?	This flag is set to Yes by default. The value of this flag cannot be changed. This implies that the cloud-based Linux systems in environments will always be identified using the login name of the user. In other words, in cloud environments, this test will, by default, report measures for every username_on_systemname.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Context switches	Indicates the rate at which the Linux operating system switched between processes or threads on this system.	Switches/sec	Ideally, the value of this measure should be in the permissible range. A high value for this measure may indicate CPU overhead due to too many small tasks switching frequently, thread contention and I/O bottlenecks. A low value may indicate underutilized CPU and system freeze or halt.
Interrupt time	Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent handling hardware interrupts instead of executing normal processes.	Percent	A low value is preferred for this measure. A consistent increase in the value of this measure may indicate a hardware or driver issue.
Pin read hits	Indicates the percentage of pinned (cached) data in memory (RAM) that is successfully read without accessing the disk.	Percent	Ideally, the value of this measure should be high. A low value for this measure indicates excessive disk reads, leading to performance bottlenecks.
Pin read rate	Indicates the rate at which the pinned (cached) data in memory (RAM) is read without accessing the disk.	Reads/sec
Processes count	Indicates the number of processes running on this system.	Number
Registry quota in use	Indicates the percentage of Linux registry space that is currently utilized by system and application settings.	Percent	The value of this measure should be low. If the value of this measure is high, administrators should consider removing leftover registry keys from uninstalled apps, deleting unwanted applications, cleaning up junk registry entries and optimizes registry storage as over utilization of the registry space can slow down the system, cause errors, or even prevent new entries from being added.
System calls rate	Indicates the rate at which the applications are sending requests to the Linux operating system kernel to perform tasks like file access, memory allocation, and process management.	Calls/sec	The value of this measure helps administrators detect performance bottlenecks, software inefficiencies, and potential system issues, if any.
Threads count	Indicates the number of thread that are currently running on this system.	Number