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Creating Capacity Usage Reports

Reporting on capacity usage not only shows what is happening on a system at a given time, but it can also help administrators plan for future resource needs. In this hands-on lab, you are tasked with generating several resource usage reports that utilize the `sar`, `vmstat`, and `iostat` commands.

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Path Info

Level
Clock icon Intermediate
Duration
Clock icon 30m
Last updated
Clock icon Aug 13, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Install the monitoring and reporting utilities (sysstat).

    Use the yum command to install the sysstat package:

    yum install -y sysstat

  2. Challenge

    Start and enable the sysstat service so that sar will begin collecting system information.

    Start and enable the sysstat service using systemctl:

    systemctl start sysstat
systemctl enable sysstat

  3. Challenge

    Update the cron file for sysstat so that the system activity accounting tool will run every thirty minutes.

    Open the sysstat cron file and change the duration for the system activity accounting tool from 10 minutes to 30 minutes:

    vim /etc/cron.d/sysstat

Update the following line:
*/10 * * * * root /usr/lib64/sa/sa1 1 1

To look like this:
*/30 * * * * root /usr/lib64/sa/sa1 1 1

Save the file by running :wq

  4. Challenge

    Capture the results of the vmstat command in a file - /root/vmstat_report. The report should have a delay of one second with a count of ten and also include timestamps.

    Use the vmstat command to generate a report and redirect the output to /root/vmstat_report:

    vmstat -t 1 10 > /root/vmstat_report

  5. Challenge

    Capture the results of the iostat command in a file - /root/iostat_report. Only include statistics from the nvme0n1 device (cpu and average removed). It should have a one second delay and count of five.

    Use the iostat command to generate a report and redirect the output to /root/iostat_report:

    iostat -dy -p nvme0n1 1 5 > /root/iostat_report
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