Linux Metrics Workshop

While you can learn a lot by emitting metrics from your application, some insights can only be gained by looking at OS metrics. In this hands-on workshop, we will cover the basics in Linux metric collection for monitoring, performance tuning and capacity planning.

Topics

1. CPU
   1. CPU Percentage
   2. CPU Load
   3. Context Switches
2. Memory
   1. Memory Usage
3. IO
   1. IO Usage
4. Network
   1. Network Utilization
5. References

Setup

The workshop was designed to run on AWS EC2 t2.small instances with general purpose SSD, Ubuntu 24.04 amd64, and transparent hugh pages disabled. You can build an AMI with all the dependencies installed using the attached packer template.

A pre-built AMI ami-01cfe208cd769212d is available on eu-central-1

If you run on your own instance, make sure you have only 1 CPU (easier to read the metrics) and that you disable transparent huge pages (echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled )