CentOS 7 Systems Administration :
System Monitoring and Performance Management
Overview
The Community Enterprise Operating System (CentOS) Systems
Administration: System Monitoring and Performance Management course
introduces participants to performance management principles, monitoring utilities /
tools, and analysis for the CentOS 7 Operating Environment. The course includes a
review of CentOS 7 subsystems, along with the utilities provided to monitor system
efficiency including sar and the *stat family of tools. In each area of discussion,
emphasis will be placed on writing tools for monitoring and analysis. These tools will
include Korn shell scripts, Perl procedures, and C language programs.
Systems: CentOS Linux Version 7 (all update levels)
Prerequisites
It is assumed that the participant has successfully completed the
CentOS 7 System Administration I and CentOS 7 System
Administration II ) courses, or has equivalent system time
as a user and a working systems administrator.
Course duration
This course normally requires three (3) days, approximately 60%
lecture, and 40% lab time.
Course Objectives
On completion of this course, a systems administrator should be able to:
- Describe performance management fundamentals
- Use the CentOS 7 and third-party tools to analyze performance
- Write tools in various languages
- Use CentOS 7 performance data extensions
- View and set kernel-based tuning parameters
- Monitor and report on process and thread activity
- Modify CPU scheduling and virtual memory operations
- Enable dynamic monitoring via SystemTap in all major areas
Course outline
Performance Basics
- Describe the principles of performance analysis
- Describe the performance management process
- Terms used to describe performance aspects
- Factors affecting system performance
- Performance metrics
- Virtual system caching
- Effects of computer architecture
CentOS 7 Monitoring Capabilities
- Monitoring tools provided with CentOS 7
- *stat family of programs
- sar / sadc
- Third party / freely available tools
- Introduction to SystemTap
- Kernel tunables (viewing, changing via sysctl)
Memory Management
- Memory layout and distribution
- Memory usage by the kernel
- Process creation
- Process virtual address space
- Buffer Cache (and allocation control)
- Shared Memory / Page Caching
- Paging and Swapping
- Monitoring Tools
CPU Management
- Software priorities concepts
- Impact of the nice parameter
- Priority boosting
- Adjusting CPU scheduling mechanisms
- Tuning (Java) threaded applications
- Process states
- Monitoring tools
I/O Management
- Breakdown of disk I/O
- Measuring Disk and I/O
- ext3/ext4/xfs performance
- File system structure concepts
- File system caching
- Name Lookup (meta-data) caching
- Tuning the cache sizes and algorithms
- (Re-)Defining the I/O scheduler
- File system performance statistics
- ext3 parameters to improve efficiency
- write strategies to ext3/ext4/xfs buffering
Network Management
- TCP/IP Layers
- Socket controls
- Controlling network services
- Setting network buffer values
- Monitoring tools
Summaries
- Memory management
- CPU management
- I/O management
- Network management
- User program management
