Briefly describe the purpose of a baseline. What areas of the system would you i

Question

Briefly describe the purpose of a baseline. What areas of the system would you include in a baseline for your Linux system? Which commands would you use to obtain the information about these areas? Use these commands to generate baseline information for your system (for the current day only) and place this information in a system log book (small binder) for later use. Next, monitor the normal activity of your system for three consecutive days and compare the results to the baseline that you have printed. Are there any differences? Incorporate this new information into your baseline by averaging the results. Are these new values a more accurate indication of normal activity? Why or why not?

Explanation / Answer

Solution:-

Baseline is a snapshot of the system normal state. Baseline is comprises of many things or parameters of the system. The experts of the system know that when a system is normal or abnormal. Experts can sense the performance of the system is degraded in some manner. So they define a baseline that is a snapshot of the state when system acts normally.

A baseline is defined to monitor the performance of a system. Baseline defines the normal state and the performance of the system is ideal in the normal state. When a system is in network then a baseline is defined by the experts that a system behaves Normal or abnormal, it's performance is on the mark or not.

In a Linux environment the baseline can be defined and the normal state is recorded of the system. Performance monitoring is done on the baseline parameters. The performance monitoring can be done via many commands in the Linux environment.

1) iostat

This command retrieves the flow of the data and information from the disk drives. This command gives the input output statistics of the system.

2) SAR -q

This commands gives the information statistics of the system similar to iostat and also gives the processor queue. The processor queue is the RAM where data is stored temporarily.

3) SAR -w

Thus command gives the statistics of the page swap in the RAM. If the rate of swapping is more then slower the performance. So this can help to identify the causes of degradation in performance.

4) netstat

If the system is in the network then netstat command can be used to retrieve many types of information. This command can be used with -a, -i.

netstat -i retrieves the interface specific information.

netstat -a retrieves the connection oriented information.

The information retrieved from the SAR command is system activity report which stores in the log file. This command Check the system activities every 10 minutes and store This to a log file. The file are created according to the date. So this can be used to see the system state history and current date. So we can compare the system performance date by date.

If a system is working on baseline parameters and after some days we found in the log file that system performance is slower and it is not working on baseline parameters. So troubleshooting can be performed and improve the performance of the system.

So a baseline is snapshot of the system performance in normal state and it can be used to keep the system in normal state and improve the performance of the system.

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