This is a powerful tool with a lot of options. It comes installed with the Fedora distributions, but to take full advantage of this tool the kernel should be recompiled from source, to reference the uncompressed kernel image with the ``--vmlinux'' option.

This article ``Performance Monitoring on Linux'' walks you through the necessary steps for compiling the source kernel on Fedora installs. Also included is a quick look at iozone, and smartmontools.

The article isn't finished. cfengine has interesting system monitoring features as well (cfenvd components), but that article is taking its time.

Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment: Second Edition

I picked up a copy of ``Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment: Second Edition'', by W. Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago. Pub Date: June 17, 2005, 960 pages. Stevens passed on in 1999 - boating accident I think. Rago is carrying on the tradition.